The Biden Administration's Hypocrisy on Sudan is a Stain on His Foreign Policy Legacy

Stopping a genocide was never a priority

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

Two of the best foreign policy journalists working today are Robbie Gramer and Nahal Toosi, now both with Politico. So, on Wednesday, when they co-bylined a piece about a topic I’ve been covering for nearly 20 years, I naturally read it with great interest.

The piece, “Biden Team’s Big Push on Sudan,” describes the Biden administration’s “eleventh-hour push to address the devastating civil war in Sudan that has spiraled into one of the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crises.” Toosi and Gramer’s big scoop is that the Biden administration is considering declaring that the atrocities in Sudan amount to an ongoing genocide, and the top general whose forces are responsible for this apparent genocide may be sanctioned by the U.S.

That general is Mohamed Hamdan “Hemedti” Dagalo, leader of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which control much of Sudan and nearly all of Darfur. Twenty years ago, the RSF were known as the Janjaweed, a fearsome militia that carried out the first Darfur genocide in coordination with the government of Sudan. Now, they are carrying out another genocide in Darfur, this time against ethnic Masalit people.

The U.S. has sanctioned many of Hemedti’s top lieutenants, including his brother, but not yet Hemedti himself—apparently out of concern that such a move might reduce his willingness to come to the negotiating table. However, with conflict escalating and atrocities mounting, it’s clear this strategy is simply not working.

The RSF’s complicity in genocide has been well-documented since civil war broke out in April 2023, so this potential move by the Biden administration comes very late. Several investigative journalists, credible international human rights watchdogs, and UN reports have uncovered evidence of war crimes that may amount to genocide. These reports all tell a similar story of RSF soldiers deliberately targeting ethnic Masalit people in West Darfur solely on the basis of their ethnic identity. Hundreds of thousands of Masalit have fled to Chad to escape this genocide.

What’s worse is that this genocide is only one part of the RSF’s campaign against civilians. For example, Human Rights Watch released a devastating report this week detailing a campaign of sexual violence perpetrated by Hemedti’s RSF, including the capturing of young Nuba women and holding them as sex slaves. Meanwhile, the opposing Sudanese Armed Forces are routinely and deliberately targeting civilians in a campaign of airstrikes against crowded marketplaces, intended to inflict maximum civilian harm. These attacks, as described by the Sudan War Monitor, “follow a year-long pattern of airstrikes against busy markets in areas controlled by the Rapid Support Forces, which typically are carried out on a set market day, with the apparent deliberate intent of maximizing casualties.”

This is the context in which the Biden administration is making its push on Sudan, a mere month before President Trump takes over. But will it make a difference? Or is this too little, too late?

The last time a U.S. administration declared a genocide in Sudan was in September 2004, when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that “genocide has been committed in Darfur and that the government of Sudan and the Janjaweed bear responsibility -- and genocide may still be occurring." By law, this should have triggered a meaningful response by the U.S. government. But it did not.

Instead, the Bush administration had other priorities.

Chances are you’ve never heard of Salah Gosh. He was the head of Sudan’s feared National Intelligence and Security Service during much of former President Omar al-Bashir’s nearly 30-year dictatorship. Gosh was a central figure in Bashir’s plan to suppress a rebellion in Darfur in the early 2000s by arming and supporting the Janjaweed. He designed and implemented the Sudanese government’s strategy of “counter-insurgency by genocide,” and it worked. An estimated 300,000 people were killed in the first Darfur genocide. The rebellion was crushed.

Gosh’s role in all this was well known by Sudan watchers and by journalists like me. What we did not know—until a blockbuster 2005 Washington Post report—was that Gosh was a CIA asset. He was even flown to Langley during the height of the genocide to provide information about Osama Bin Laden, who had spent several years in Sudan before fleeing to Afghanistan, where he planned the September 11 attacks.

As with much of the Bush administration’s foreign policy, counterterrorism trumped all other priorities. For Sudan, But this had the effect of reducing American—and international—pressure to confront the first Darfur genocide as it was unfolding.

Twenty years later, the Biden administration is facing a similar situation in which other competing priorities are undermining a meaningful response to atrocities in Sudan. The results have been similarly disastrous for the people of Sudan and for peace and security in a very volatile part of the world.