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Displaced Sudanese women prepare tea at a Medecin Sans Frontiere hospital at Golo, west Darfur, in October.
Hard Numbers: Sudan death toll far worse than feared, Gazprom cuts off Austria, Pope suggests Israeli “genocide” in Gaza, Record-breaking fight night, History-making Hebridean shopping
242,000,000: Russia’s state-owned Gazprom is cutting off natural gas supplies to Austria. The move comes in response to Austrian oil company OMV’s announcement that it would stop paying for the gas to offset a $242 million arbitration award it won due to an earlier energy cut-off to its German subsidiary. Gazprom responded that it would halt gas delivery starting on Saturday. Austrian Chancellor Karl Nehammer reassured citizens the country has enough gas reserves to last the winter.
70: Israeli airstrikes reportedly killed 70 people in northern Gaza early Sunday, and dozens more remained trapped in the rubble. This coincides with comments by Pope Francis suggesting that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza “has the characteristics of a genocide.” The comments were included in excerpts from an upcoming book published on Sunday.
60,000,000: If you tuned in for the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight on Friday, you had lots of company. Netflix says a “record-breaking” 60 million households watched Iron Mike’s first fight in nearly 20 years. While Paul beat Tyson, neither boxer was knocked out, and they both made a killing: Paul is expected to have raked in around $40 million to Tyson’s $20 million.
2,039: History was made in Scotland’s Stornoway, the largest town in the Hebrides, on Sunday. Despite 2,039 of the town’s roughly 7,000 residents signing an online petition against a local Tesco store opening on Sundays – critics wanted to “keep Sunday special” and shopping-free – the United Kingdom's largest grocer opened its doors to “allow customers more flexibility.”
In Sudan, famine and genocide loom
In Sudan, famine and genocide loom
The Rapid Support Forces, a powerful paramilitary group engaged in fighting with the Sudanese military since April 2023, have encircled El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur in Sudan, in its latest advances amid Sudan's year-long civil war. The city is home to 1.8 million people and a critical hub for humanitarian aid in a region hurtling toward famine.
If it falls, which looks likely, the RSF will be able to make Darfur their home base to fight against the Sudanese military for years to come.
Over the last nine days, 200 football fields’ worth of civilian infrastructure were destroyed by the RSF burning villages to the ground and the Sudanese military indiscriminately bombing civilian areas.
Plenty of guns, but no food. Sudan is facing the world’s worst famine in 40 years, according to US officials. The country has been issued $2.7 billion in humanitarian aid, but less than a fifth of it has trickled in as both sides of the fighting block aid deliveries and use hunger as a weapon.
Meanwhile, weapons continue to flow. On Tuesday, the UN blamed the war’s continuation on arms shipments from external actors like the United Arab Emirates. According to the Sudanese military, the UAE sends weapons into the region several times a week.
“Never again.” When the RSF took control of the city of El Geneina last fall, 15,000 people were killed in days. The main targets of RSF violence are non-Arabs, just as they were when the Janjaweed carried out a genocidal campaign against them in the 2000s. El Fasher is on the precipice of another ethnic massacre, with the UN warning of genocide.
A boy sits atop a hill overlooking a refugee camp near the Chad-Sudan border, November 9, 2023. Hundreds of Masalit families from Sudan's West Darfur state were relocated here months after fleeing to the Chadian border town of Adre, following an ethnically targeted massacre in the city of El Geneina.
Sudan’s Masalit people are being butchered. Is the world watching?
On Saturday, the Sudanese Army fended off an attack by the Rapid Support Forces on the city of el-Fasher in the western region of Darfur. Hundreds of thousands of civilians are sheltering in the city, the final stronghold of government forces in the region, having escaped unspeakable horrors perpetrated by the RSF and allied Arab militias.
The clashes around el-Fasher lasted several hours and included strikes on heavily populated areas. The Army may have won this weekend, but the RSF maintains control of the hinterlands and will likely attempt to take the city again. The more remarkable part, however, is that the Army acted to protect civilians.
Last week, Human Rights Watch published a landmark report on earlier violence in Darfur, based on over 220 interviews with civilians. It showed that as RSF and allied fighters systematically raped, tortured, and murdered Masalit people, the Army forces simply stood by.
The Masalit and other Black ethnic groups in southern and western Sudan were the traditional targets of Arab slavers from the north. That ethno-religious conflict has formed part of the basis of multiple civil wars since Sudan’s independence, and the Masalit, in particular, were already viciously persecuted by Janjaweed militias starting in 2003.
The violence resurged after a Masalit governor, Mohamed Abdalla al-Doma, took power in West Darfur in 2020. Local Arabs in the capital el-Geneina demanded protection from the RSF – which evolved directly from the Janjaweed militias – and the fighting has been worse there than anywhere in Sudan apart from Khartoum.
The HRW report estimates up to 15,000 people died in the province between April and November 2023, with survivors recounting staggering sexual and physical violence. One woman, Karima, age 26, says men went door to door in her neighborhood, executing male civilians. When they reached her house, they beat her and raped her three times at gunpoint.
She and over half a million survivors have now fled to eastern Chad, where they live in desperate conditions in refugee camps. It’s a perverse homecoming for some who grew up in similar camps two decades ago.
Once again, the international community is struggling to find time for Sudan. The Biden administration marked the one year anniversary of the present war last month by issuing an executive order authorizing sanctions on Sudanese leaders — pretty weak tea. The UN authorized a factfinding mission in October 2023 that has been unable to carry out its mandate, while the World Food Programme’s appeal for aid for Sudan was only 5% fulfilled in February.
Failing to protect civilians like Karima isn’t only a tragedy; it undermines confidence in the international order, particularly in Africa, the continent that will drive the world’s population and economic growth in the coming century. It’s also a damning reflection of the international community’s commitment to human rights and justice.
FILE PHOTO: Sudanese refugees who fled the violence in Sudan's Darfur region and newly arrived ride their donkeys looking for space to temporarily settle, near the border between Sudan and Chad in Goungour, Chad May 8, 2023.
Fears of mass killings rise in Darfur
Genocide once again threatens to devastate Darfur as the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces encircle El Fasher, the last city in North Darfur not under the paramilitary group’s control.
The United Nations warned this weekend of imminent attacks on El Fasher’s 800,000 residents and hundreds of thousands of refugees displaced by Sudan's year-long civil war, a situation that human rights investigators describe as having the potential for“Hiroshima- and Nagasaki-level casualties.”
A spokesperson for UN Secretary-General António Guterressaid, “The world must act swiftly to prevent a potential genocide in the region.”
Eight and a half million Sudanese have been displaced since conflict broke out in April 2023, with 25 million at risk of famine nationwide. The RSF has been accused of massacres and mass rapes, most notably in the West Darfur capital of El Geneina, where 10,000-14,000 people were killed inethnically targeted attacks last year against Black African Masalit and other non-Arab civilians.
Now, echoes of Darfur’s2003 famine, which stemmed from the same ethnic conflicts, have resurfaced – but with competing conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine, aid workers fear the world once again will not pay attention until it is too late.Pro-Palestinian protesters pose for a photo in front of the International Court of Justice.
Rorschach ruling from ICJ on Gaza genocide charges
The International Court of Justice on Friday gave its preliminary opinion on the South African case which alleges Israel is carrying out a genocide in Gaza. As you might expect, everyone sees in it what they wish.
The raw facts: The court found that Israel’s actions in Gaza are at least “plausibly genocidal” which means the case can continue until a verdict is reached. That could take years and will require a higher standard of proof than the current ruling.
In the meantime, the court stopped short of calling for a ceasefire, which South Africa had sought. Instead, the court ordered Israel to observe several provisional measures to prevent genocidal acts, increase humanitarian aid, and preserve evidence for the ongoing investigation.
Incompatible realities. In the view of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has dismissed the ICJ case as an antisemitic attack on Israel, the ruling “rejected” the genocide charge. South Africa’s foreign ministry, meanwhile, said it was a “landmark ruling” and pointed out that it was “binding.”
Who’s gonna bind it? The ICJ has no means of enforcing the ruling, which requires Israel to provide an account of its efforts to uphold the provisions within one month. The US, Israel’s biggest financial and military backer, has previously called the South African case “unfounded”.
But does Biden face a symbolic dilemma? The White House has styled itself as the defender of a “rules-based international order” under attack by “rogue states” and their allies. Washington’s support for, say, Ukraine has been framed strongly in these terms — the US has even backed Kyiv’s genocide claims against Russia at the court. To ignore the ruling of a UN court would, as one seasoned observer put it, “be a middle finger” to the international order.
Women from the city of Al-Junina (West Darfur) cry after receiving the news about the death of their relatives as they waited for them in Chad, Nov. 7, 2023.
Sudan genocide feared after massacre at refugee camp
Sudan’s ongoing civil war may once again be spiraling into genocide. Late last week, the UN Refugee Agency condemned the mass killing of at least 800 people within 72 hours by the Arab paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and its allies in the Ardamata refugee camp in West Darfur. This weekend, the EU's chief diplomat Josep Borrell cited witness reports that over 1,000 members of the Black African Masalit population had been killed, noting that the international community “cannot turn a blind eye on what is happening in Darfur and allow another genocide to happen in this region."
Borrell was referencing the mass killing in Darfur that saw 300,000 Masalit murdered between 2003 and 2005 by an Arab militia known as the Janjaweed. Former President Omar al-Bashir used the militia to crush Darfuri rebel groups who were revolting against the neglect of the region's Black African population. Today’s RSF, including its leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, aka Hemedti, are reportedly drawn from this group of Janjaweed fighters.
The UN Refugee Agency also reported “shocking accounts of widespread rape and sexual violence” committed by the RSF, following a report in August 2023 by the UN Human Rights Commission that the RSF was deploying rape and sexual violence “as tools to punish and terrorize communities.”
So far, however, no major world leaders have condemned the violence, called for a ceasefire, or demanded meetings to end the conflict.
Print photocopies of Benjamin Ferencz, while he served as a prosecutor during the Nuremberg trials, on a table at his home in Delray Beach, Florida on June 1, 2022.
Nuremberg now: the legacy of Ben Ferencz
At 27 years old, with no trial experience to speak of, Ben Ferencz entered the courtroom at Nuremberg in November of 1945. He was tasked with holding to account a regime that had slaughtered millions and tried to annihilate his own people. Acting as chief prosecutor, Ferencz secured convictions against 22 Nazis.
Ferencz, the last-surviving prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals, passed away last week at the age of 103. As a child, he and his family fled anti-semitism in Romania. After finishing law school at Harvard, he joined the US army, taking part in the Normandy landings and the Battle of the Bulge. He was then assigned to General Patton’s HQ as part of a special unit investigating Nazi atrocities, interviewing survivors and witnessing first-hand the horrors of the concentration camps. That experience would shape the rest of his life. He would remain a warrior, not on the battlefield but in the public arena as a professor of international law and tireless campaigner for justice for the victims of genocide.
The Nuremberg trials marked a watershed moment in the history of modern human rights law. Never before had an international tribunal sought to hold global leaders to account for starting a war and carrying out crimes against humanity. They also included a new term- genocide – as part of the indictments.
In the decades since, the notion that war criminals may face justice has – however imperfect in practice – become an accepted part of international norms. That’s especially true since 2002 when Ferencz’s efforts helped to establish the International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague. International courts have judged the perpetrators of genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia in ways that were unimaginable when Ferencz was a child.
Still, more than 75 years after Nuremberg, international justice remains a work in progress. Participation in the ICC is voluntary, and even the world’s most powerful democracy, the United States, refuses to do so, out of concerns that it would limit American sovereignty. That puts Washington – which has faced its own human rights allegations in the past – in the unsavory company of serial abusers like Russia, China, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, which also refuse to ratify the ICC’s underlying statutes.
Despite a recent ICC warrant against Russian President Vladimir Putin, for example, there’s little chance that he’ll face prosecution. Bashar al-Assad, for his part, has survived the civil war he helped create, and is unlikely to face justice for the gruesome crimes that his regime committed during the war.
The coming years pose particular challenges to the cause of international justice. For one thing, the emergence of new major international powers may make it even harder to secure universally-applicable mechanisms of human rights law. Technological advances, meanwhile, enable state and non-state actors to spread disinformation in an attempt to erode trust in facts and evidence. For instance, the Russian disinformation narratives have asserted that the civilian massacre in Bucha, Ukraine was staged.
Nevertheless, Ben Ferencz and his colleagues gave today's international human rights lawyers and activists the tools to document evidence and gather witness testimony, and the mechanisms to hold leaders accountable.
Ferencz himself was under no illusions about the challenges of creating a system that would bring war criminals to justice. In his later years he remarked “Nuremberg taught me that creating a world of tolerance and compassion would be a long and arduous task.”
But he also reminded us that “if we did not devote ourselves to developing effective world law, the same cruel mentality that made the Holocaust possible might one day destroy the entire human race.”
Is Putin's war in Ukraine genocide?
Is Putin's war in Ukraine genocide?
Over the weekend, as Ukrainian forces retook the Kyiv region and Russian troops began retreating to (and expanding fighting in) eastern and southern Ukraine, gruesome images emerged of dead civilians littering the streets of Bucha, a suburb of Kyiv.
According to Ukrainian officials and independent reports, the victims included not just fighting-age men, but countless women, children, and elderly people. Hundreds had been allegedly beaten, raped, tortured, and tied up by Russian soldiers before being executed and left to rot on the street, buried in mass graves, or burned. Others were shot in the back and killed while riding their bikes and carrying groceries, for no apparent military reason.
The bodies of more than 400 civilians have been recovered from towns surrounding Kyiv that were recently under Russian occupation so far, according to Ukraine’s prosecutor-general Iryna Venediktova.
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Russia has denied responsibility for the killings, claiming (without evidence) that they occurred after its soldiers withdrew from the area and were staged by Ukrainian forces as a “provocation.” Russia’s Defense Ministry said that "not a single civilian has faced any violent action by the Russian military" in Bucha. However, satellite images and eyewitness and survivor accounts suggest that the atrocities were in fact committed by occupying Russian troops in the weeks prior to their retreat from the region.Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who visited Bucha on Monday, called the Russian actions there a “genocide” against the Ukrainian people and nation. "We are citizens of Ukraine, and we don’t want to be subdued to the policy of [Russia]," he said in an interview with CBS’ Face the Nation on Sunday. "This is the reason we are being destroyed and exterminated."
Not everyone in the international community shares Zelensky’s assessment.
President Biden condemned the killings and called for an international investigation and a trial of Russian President Vladimir Putin, whom he had called a “war criminal” weeks before reports of the Bucha massacre emerged. "[Putin] is brutal and what's happening in Bucha is outrageous and everyone's seen it," Biden said on Monday.
However, while he and his national security advisor Jake Sullivan described the murders as “war crimes,” they refused to classify them as genocide, saying the US had “not yet seen a level of systematic deprivation of life of the Ukrainian people” that would warrant the designation.So did NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg. "It is a brutality against civilians we haven't seen in Europe for decades, and it's horrific and it's absolutely unacceptable that civilians are targeted and killed," Stoltenberg told CNN’s State of the Union on Sunday.
Most other Western leaders have also denounced the killings as war crimes, with German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock calling for those responsible to be held accountable, UK Foreign Secretary Liz Truss demanding an International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation, and French President Emmanuel Macron tweeting that “the Russian authorities will have to answer for these crimes.”
What’s the difference between war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide?International law considers an army to have committed “war crimes” if it is found to have intentionally and knowingly killed, mutilated, raped, tortured, deported, imprisoned, or otherwise mistreated civilians and certain types of combatants (e.g., captured, surrendered, wounded) in the course of war.
“Crimes against humanity” are defined as comprising similar acts (e.g., murder, torture, rape, etc.) but only “when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack” and “in furtherance of a State or organizational policy to commit such attack.” That’s a higher bar.
Finally, “genocide” encompasses a more limited set of acts committed “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group,” including: killing members of the group, causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group, and forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
Both war crimes and crimes against humanity refer to the targeting of individuals. The main difference between these two types of crime is one of scale and organizational premeditation. By contrast, genocide entails an effort to destroy a particular group of people. It is considered the gravest crime under international law.
What happened in Bucha?
There’s little doubt that Ukrainian civilians were unlawfully murdered by Russian forces in Bucha. At a minimum, these actions constitute war crimes, since it’s evident that many of those killed weren’t combatants and were not killed as part of a military operation.The key open questions are how widespread and systematic the Russian crimes are, how high up the responsibility for them goes, and whether the victims were targeted as individuals who were in the wrong place at the wrong time or as members of a national group (Ukrainians) that the perpetrators intended to destroy by virtue of belonging to such group.
The first question is likely to be answered in the coming weeks, as more parts of Ukraine are (hopefully) liberated from Russian control and further evidence of atrocities comes to light. Already we’ve seen a pattern of horrific abuses committed by Russian troops against civilians in many of the towns they occupied aside from Bucha.Regarding the question of responsibility, given the way the Russian state works, it is plausible that President Putin himself ordered or acquiesced to the commission of the crimes. Proving that is another matter entirely.
As for the third question, there’s not enough evidence to say one way or the other (yet). Could the facts on the ground we’ve seen so far be consistent with genocide? Sure. But they are also consistent with war crimes and crimes against humanity, and in no way can physical evidence be probative of genocidal intent.What might, however, be suggestive of it are certain Russian state-sanctioned statements that speak to the motivations behind the campaign in Ukraine. Such is the case of an article titled “What Russia must do with Ukraine” published in the Russian state-owned outlet RIA Novosti on April 3, which lays out a case for why the “de-nazification” of Ukraine—one of Russia’s primary objectives in the war—necessarily requires “de-Ukrainianization”. In other words, the elimination of the Ukrainian nation. If this document reflects the Kremlin’s thinking, then it’d be evidence, albeit not conclusive evidence, of genocidal intent. But short of that, judgement should be withheld. Intent can be incredibly difficult to figure out even with the benefit of hindsight, and we are still very much in the fog of war. This is a question for tomorrow’s historians.
Could Putin be brought to justice?The International Criminal Court, established by the Rome Statute in 1998, is the body with jurisdiction over individuals accused of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Neither Russia, Ukraine, nor the US are state parties to the ICC (which makes the legitimacy of US government claims of war crimes more challenging), but Ukraine did accept the jurisdiction of the court over crimes committed on its territory following Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas in 2014. This means that technically, the ICC has the authority to go after any atrocities Russia may have committed in Ukraine since then.
In fact, in late February (before Bucha), the ICC opened an investigation into alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in Ukraine. And on March 4, the UN Human Rights Council established an independent inquiry commission to investigate alleged Russian human rights violations in Ukraine.
Yet war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide have all been historically difficult charges to investigate and prosecute. It’s hard to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that a given act intentionally and knowingly targeted civilians, and it’s even more challenging to determine who along the chain of command was responsible or complicit. Tying high-ranking officials like President Putin to the crimes would require strong evidence, such as direct orders or eyewitness testimony, linking the officials to the crimes in question.
Even if Putin and/or other high-level officials could be shown to have ordered or been aware of the crimes, the ICC has no jurisdiction to arrest people in Russian territory. Since international criminal trials cannot occur in absentia, Putin or other Russian officials would have to be arrested in a country that accepts the jurisdiction of the court before they could be brought to trial.
It's accordingly unlikely that Putin ever does jail time for his crimes in Ukraine as long as he remains in power. That’s not to say that he can’t be deposed and extradited by a future, more human rights-minded Russian government. Remember, there’s no statute of limitations for war crimes.
Do these labels even matter?Practically, not much, for the reasons explained above.
But symbolically, casting a world leader as a war criminal carries meaningful policy consequences. For one, it projects moral clarity and sends a message to the victims and perpetrators that what happened is beyond the pale of acceptable international norms and standards. It ensures that Putin’s break with the West is complete and irreversible. And it pressures the international community into acting more aggressively to bring about an end to the war, at the same time as it lowers the odds of a negotiated settlement and sanctions relief for Russia.
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