By Robbie Gramer and Nahal Toosi
Administration officials are weighing plans to declare the atrocities in Sudan as a genocide and issue a raft of new sanctions on a Sudanese militia vying for power in the war, officials familiar with the matter tell NatSec Daily. | Luis Tato/AFP via Getty Images
The Biden administration is launching an eleventh-hour push to address the devastating civil war in Sudan that has spiraled into one of the world’s worst ongoing humanitarian crises.
Administration officials are weighing plans to declare the atrocities in Sudan as a genocide and issue a raft of new sanctions on a Sudanese militia vying for power in the war, four current and former officials familiar with the matter tell NatSec Daily.
This includes sanctions on the chief of the so-called Rapid Support Forces militia, MOHAMED HAMDAN “HEMEDTI” DAGALO and other RSF enterprises. The United States has accused both the Sudanese armed forces and RSF of war crimes, and accused the RSF of ethnic cleansing. PLEASE NOTE: Genocide Watch rejects the term "ethnic cleansing." "Ethnic cleansing" is a euphemism used for genocide denial. Genocide Watch firmly believes that genocide is unfolding in Sudan.
Other officials and experts outside the administration are pushing for the Biden team to appoint a senior career U.S. Agency for International Development official to oversee the continued flow of U.S. and international aid into the war-stricken country as Washington prepares for a change of power between JOE BIDEN and DONALD TRUMP’s administrations. These officials were granted anonymity to discuss internal policy deliberations freely.
The push comes as Secretary of State ANTONY BLINKEN travels to New York on Thursday for a high-level U.N. meeting on Sudan. Ahead of the U.N. meeting, U.S. officials pushed to establish new humanitarian corridors into hard-hit areas of Sudan, including Khartoum, the country’s capital.
Taken together, these measures reflect a final push by the Biden team to nudge forward progress on ending the Sudanese civil war after multiple rounds of failed peace talks and mounting pressure from U.S. lawmakers and humanitarian groups to do more during their final month in office.
Though it receives a fraction of the public attention or humanitarian relief funding that the wars in the Middle East or Ukraine get, the conflict in Sudan has pushed millions of people to the brink of famine. It has also become a geopolitical powder keg, with foreign powers including Saudi Arabia, Iran, Egypt, the UAE and Russia all vying for influence among the warring parties while prolonging and worsening the war.
The Biden administration has faced sharp criticism from lawmakers like Sen. JIM RISCH (R-Idaho), the incoming chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, for not yet doing enough to hold the drivers of the Sudanese civil war accountable. Human rights organizations have rebuked the Biden administration for not publicly holding to account the United Arab Emirates for its role in the conflict as well. The UAE, a key U.S. partner in the Middle East, has been widely accused of funding and arming the RSF as it carries out a campaign of mass murder and rape across Sudan.
“The United States needs to do more. And the UAE needs to stop fueling the fire there,” Sen. BEN CARDIN (D-Md.), the outgoing chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told NatSec Daily.
An expert on U.S.-Africa ties with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, said any final acts by the Biden administration on Sudan could “free Trump from having to make those decisions” and empower lawmakers who focus on the conflict to “use this as fuel to keep pushing Trump to continue U.S. leadership on Sudan.”
“Any momentum that can come from this is a good thing if it can carry over into the next administration,” he said.
A genocide or renewed atrocities determination is seen as an important political tool to mobilize the international community’s attention to a crisis. Two officials said the State Department was still deliberating on a genocide declaration, which requires intense internal legal and technical reviews, and it remains unclear whether Blinken would endorse such a measure. U.N. experts have already warned that the conflict in Sudan increasingly resembles genocide.
The State Department declined to comment specifically on the matter, saying it doesn’t publicly discuss sanctions or new determinations in advance. It said it is pushing for an immediate cessation of hostilities and the opening of humanitarian corridors into Sudan to reach the country’s most vulnerable civilians. The White House National Security Council declined to comment.
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