For 21 months and counting, the conflict raging in Sudan has inflicted immense suffering on communities caught in a cycle of unimaginable atrocities and humanitarian disaster. More than 11 million people have been forced to leave their homes. Over half of Sudan’s population of 49 million urgently need humanitarian assistance. Famine has already been declared in some regions and is now spreading rapidly across the country.
Much of the current conflict is driven by fighting between two armed forces – the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) – each loyal to one of two leaders who were allies in the 2019 ouster of Omar al-Bashir. The RSF has systematically engaged in brutal, systematic identity-based violence, including ethnically motivated killings, rape, and sexual violence. Meanwhile, SAF has resorted to indiscriminate aerial bombing, causing massive destruction and immense suffering among civilian populations. Both the SAF and the RSF have employed starvation as a weapon of war.
All civilians are under threat, with non-Arab communities often further targeted on the specific basis of ethnicity. In the West Darfur city of El Geneina alone, the U.N. recorded nearly 15,000 people killed within a few months in 2023, mostly belonging to the Masalit ethnic group. Within the Darfur states more broadly, atrocities became widespread as the RSF, and its allied militias continued to expand their control over more areas. Now, for more than eight months, the RSF has encircled El Fashir, Darfur’s largest city and the only city yet to fall under its control. In its campaign to seize the city, the RSF has been targeting and razing non-Arab communities, particularly the Fur and Zaghawa villages around El Fashir. These tactics mirror those employed in West Darfur and include targeting medical and humanitarian centers, shelling internally displaced persons camps, and obstructing civilian access to resources essential for their survival.
In response to these horrors, in April 2024, our team at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights (RWCHR), led the first international independent inquiry into breaches of the Genocide Convention in Sudan. The analysis, based on clear and convincing evidence, conclusively demonstrates that the RSF committed genocide against the Masalit people in West Darfur. Furthermore, we have reason to believe the RSF and its allied militias are perpetrating genocide against other non-Arab groups in North Darfur.
Since the release of our report, we have engaged extensively with senior government officials and relevant bodies around the world to ensure appropriate responses to the atrocities are taken, including recognizing the genocide, sanctioning the senior genocidaires, and ending arms exports to the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and others.
The evidence of the UAE’s massive operation propping up the RSF with all the heavy weaponry and financial backing it needs to survive and continue carrying out atrocities since the very start of the conflict is irrefutable, including drones and intelligence. There is even evidence suggesting the UAE is directly controlling advanced military drones from its territory to provide intelligence and arms shipments.
While the U.S. genocide determination in Sudan has come late, it will still have far-reaching legal and policy implications for the United States and the other 152 States parties to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.
It is late because it comes months after clear evidence of genocide in Darfur, and the symbolism of such a determination could have had an impact on protecting communities facing RSF atrocities. It could have restrained the RSF and its enablers from further destroying life-sustaining infrastructure and choking off areas in North Darfur and elsewhere, plunging communities into famine and threatening the survival of millions.
Nonetheless, the determination is a watershed moment.
The U.S. determination is a meaningful stride in advancing accountability and justice in Sudan. However, there are lessons to be learned from recent history to prevent the failings of the past.
Twenty years ago, in 2004, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell made a similar genocide determination, naming the same group of perpetrators (today’s RSF developed from, and is largely made up of, members of the group previously known as Janjaweed) and urging the U.N. to respond accordingly.
The U.S. government, this time under President Joe Biden, has explicitly identified the cycle of violence culminating in the crime of genocide twice in a single generation. The Biden administration must now take urgent action during the president’s last week in office to ensure the survivors of genocide are not abandoned again without concrete accountability and protection mechanisms required.
This genocide determination should prompt immediate repercussions for the most responsible actors, including the UAE and other complicit foreign States and private entities.
According to legal precedent, including the International Court of Justice (ICJ)’s holding in the Bosnia case (para. 430), all States were already under a duty to employ all means available to prevent genocide in Darfur as early as June 2023 when the serious risk arose, as the RSF attacked El Geneina, and certainly by November 2023, when the RSF repeated its patterns of ethnically motivated killings in Ardamata and its environs.
Now, the determination recognizing that genocide has occurred, and is ongoing, raises additional international liability for States and individuals for complicity in the genocide, prohibited by Art. III (e). The ICJ held in the Bosnia case (para. 419) that complicity includes “the provision of means to enable or facilitate the commission of the crime,” and resembles the category of “aid or assistance” for the commission of a wrongful act under international law.
When influential States like the United States recognize the genocide, all States, corporate entities, and individuals are on notice that they will face repercussions under international law for any involvement in the RSF’s campaign. This is particularly significant because, historically, international justice mechanisms have focused on the direct individual perpetrators, while outside actors evade responsibility, even though these actors play a primary role by empowering, directing, and instrumentalizing commanders on the ground – the combatants who one genocide scholar rightfully characterized as small cogs in the machine.
The concept of complicity in domestic criminal law (where an accomplice is viewed as a secondary culprit) cannot be compared to the notion under international law (where the complicit actor may be the primary cause of atrocities). The militias on the ground in Sudan simply cannot commit the crime of genocide without outside material support, making their sponsors equally, if not more, culpable for providing the concrete financial and military infrastructure needed to commit their atrocities, especially in the case of the UAE, on whom the RSF relies for survival.
Most significantly, for United States foreign policy, this determination means that it must immediately re-evaluate its defense relationship with the UAE, the main backer of the RSF, starting with the suspension of major arms deals. As recently as Oct. 11 of last year, the United States approved a sale of $1.2 billion in offensive arms and related logistics to the UAE. The Department of Defense’s announcement even admitted the sale is intended to contribute to the UAE’s “military goals of updating capability while further enhancing interoperability with … [its] partners.” These partners under the security pact may include the RSF. But regardless of the end recipient of these arms, the U.S. must not provide arms to a country openly complicit in an ongoing genocide.
The U.S. has itself designated a network of RSF entities located on UAE territory, which provide the foundation for the RSF’s military and business empire.
While the warring parties are armed by a variety of foreign malign actors, including Russia and Iran, the UAE is by far the most consequential actor driving conflict and atrocities on the ground. The genocide determination therefore cannot be dismissed as just part of an internal conflict across the world, removed from U.S. involvement, when one of the United States’ closest defense partners is directly sustaining the genocidaires. The United States must reevaluate its security relationship with, and suspend arms sales to, the UAE, given the heightened risk of arms being transferred to the RSF.
Biden’s national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, has already confronted his Emirati counterpart with U.S. intelligence about the UAE’s support of the RSF. In December, the White House vowed to present its assessment to Congress on the credibility of UAE assurances that it is not providing weapons to the RSF by Biden’s last day in office this Friday, that arms exports to the UAE are not being used to support the RSF. U.S. officials assigned to this file have one more week to comply with their basic legal and moral obligations by halting all arms deals with the UAE or be remembered as an administration that knowingly failed to respond to, and end complicity in, a genocide that they themselves named.
It is our hope that a few principled people remain in government willing to draw the line at genocide in recognition of the plight of millions of Sudanese who have suffered destruction facilitated by the UAE. The UAE should not be permitted to profit from the atrocities and cannot be allowed to pay off any obstacle to continue its destructive campaign in Sudan.
But now that the United States has finally recognized that a genocide is unfolding, the time for signaling is long over. The United States must halt all security cooperation and cancel its arms sales to the UAE. The time for action is now.
The U.S. genocide determination presents another opportunity to begin concerted efforts to support the people of Sudan and set an example that wars and human rights abuses should not and cannot be profitable. Consequences will ensue. The outgoing administration still has a chance to do that for the people of Sudan.