‘Are We Not Humans?’

After my reporting trip to the Chad-Sudan border and columns about the murder, rape and starvation that have devastated Sudan, readers wrote in with many thoughtful comments and questions. Here’s my effort to address some of them:

Perhaps you could help us understand the root causes of this conflict. Is the basis for this conflict between the two warring factions religious identity, Shariah law? — David Wood, Johnson City, Tenn.

The two main warring factions are rival Sudanese military branches now locked in a civil war: the Sudanese Armed Forces and a militia called the Rapid Support Forces. Imagine if the U.S. Army and a government-backed Ku Klux Klan military force joined together to stage a coup to overthrow America’s elected government, then co-ruled oppressively for a time, and finally began fighting each other while also slaughtering and starving civilians. That’s roughly the picture.

The Rapid Support Forces were responsible for most of the massacres and rapes that I described in my columns in Sudan’s Darfur region, an echo of the Darfur genocide of two decades ago.

In Darfur, the divide is not religious, as almost all people are Sunni Muslim. Rather, it is threefold. First, the Rapid Support Forces are Arabs and target non-Arab ethnic groups. Second, those Arab attackers are mostly lighter complexioned and target Black Africans (sometimes calling them slaves or comparing them to litter or black plastic bags). Third, the Arab groups are often nomadic herders while the African tribes frequently are settled farmers, leading to conflicts over water access and grazing rights that have been exacerbated by climate change.

How can we best respond to a famine like this? Air loads of food or repairing local farming communities? — Daniel Brownstein, Berkeley, Calif.

A famine has already been declared in Sudan, and some experts fear that it could become one of the worst in history, eclipsing the 1984 famine in Ethiopia and other countries. To see starving children is searing: They do not cry or demand food but are almost expressionless, for the dying body does not expend calories on anything but keeping the major organs alive.

The best way to prevent so severe a famine in Sudan would be to end the war. But if the war continues, then we should at least press the warring parties to allow more humanitarian access. That means letting trucks bring food to communities that are starving. Doctors Without Borders reports that it has had to cut off rations for 5,000 malnourished children because warring parties are blocking attempts to resupply.

In most of the world, “to starve” is intransitive: Children starve. In Sudan, it is also transitive: Warlords starve children. The U.S. should use intelligence community resources to monitor atrocities and release intercepts and images to hold warring parties accountable and end the impunity.