The UK's Failure to Recognize the Genocide in Sudan
- Genocide Watch
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 3 hours ago
The U.K.’s Failure to Recognize the Genocide in Sudan
By Dr. Gregory Stanton
Founding President
Genocide Watch
Conflicts between the Arab dominated Sudanese government and non-Arab ethnic groups have resulted in many genocides targeting non-Arab people in Sudan.
Genocide became Sudanese state policy when the Arab supremacist Arab Gathering seized power in Khartoum in 1983. The Arab Gathering aimed to drive black African ethnic groups out of all fertile agricultural land and oil and gold producing regions of Sudan. Its ideology taught that civilization began with the people of the Nile. Blacks were naturally destined to be slaves.
Determined to dominate all of Sudan, the Sudanese army and Arab militias have massacred hundreds of thousands of non-Arab people in the Nuba Mountains, Darfur, the Blue Nile, South Kordofan, Abyei, and South Sudan. Over 2.5 million non-Arabs have been displaced since 1983.
In 2003-2005, government-backed Janjaweed militias carried out systematic killings of non-Arabs and a scorched earth policy in Darfur. They were supported with bombing by the Sudanese Air Force. They forcibly displaced Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa communities and murdered, looted, and mass raped non-Arab populations in Darfur.
Janjaweed militias and Sudanese Air Force bombing killed at least 300,000 non-Arab people and forcibly displaced 2.5 million. Social scientific studies by the US State Department led Secretary of State Powell and President Bush to declare that genocide was being committed in Darfur.
A joint UN-AU peacekeeping force, UNAMID, was established in 2007 with a mandate to protect civilians. However, UNAMID became an observer mission, rather than a peacekeeping force. It failed to protect the hundreds of thousands of people in Sudanese IDP camps from rapes and murders.
The Janjaweed militias were issued uniforms and became an official government force, renamed the "Rapid Support Forces" (RSF) commanded by General Hemedti, a top Arab warlord in the Darfur genocide.
UN Security Council Resolution 1593 (2005) of 31 March 2005 referred the situation in Darfur to the International Criminal Court (ICC). The ICC issued arrest warrants for Omar al-Bashir and other leaders of the Darfur genocide for crimes against humanity and war crimes in 2009, and in 2010 for charges of genocide against al-Bashir. Al-Bashir contempuously appointed the accused criminals to be governors over the areas where they committed their crimes.
Anti-government protests began in late 2018 and a military coup ousted Omar al-Bashir in 2019. At the demand of the new Sudan junta, UNAMID withdrew in December 2020.
Although a civilian-led democracy was promised following the military coup, another military coup followed in 2021 which removed civilians from government. Generals Burhan and Hemedti fought for power in Khartoum. The RSF took control in western Sudan, including Darfur.
Fighting broke out between Hemedti’s RSF and Gen. Burhan’s Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) on April 15, 2023. Since then, the SAF and the RSF have been engaged in a fierce battle for control of Sudan.
Over 60,000 civilians have been killed in the civil war, 1.5 million Sudanese have fled the country, and over 6.1 million have been internally displaced.
The massive influx of new refugees from Sudan has overwhelmed neighboring countries. Most countries including the US, Canada, and France have evacuated their diplomats. Uncertainty exists regarding the location of al-Bashir. He may be secretly under the protection of General Burhan, al-Bashir's former army leader.
Hospitals have run out of supplies, and have been directly hit by shells and gunfire. They lack electricity and medicines.
War crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide
Both the RSF and SAF are guilty of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. They have deliberately and indiscriminately attacked civilians and civilian and humanitarian infrastructure.
In 2024, the UN-backed Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan and the African Commission for Human and Peoples’ Rights-mandated Joint Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan documented the war crimes and crimes against humanity committed by the RSF and SAF and called for the Security Council to expand the jurisdiction of the ICC to cover all of Sudan.
The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have committed genocide against the ethnic Masalit people and other non-Arab groups in West Darfur. The RSF massacred at least 28,000 Masalit in the town of El Geneina alone in 2023. Tens of thousands of civilians have been massacred by the RSF throughout Sudan.
Women and girls, as young as one year old, have repeatedly been targeted for rape and sexual slavery by the RSF, often ethnically motivated. The RSF has destroyed 145 health facilities, depriving 65% of the Darfuri population of basic health care, and continues to use famine as a weapon of war by blocking humanitarian assistance from reaching IDP camps, such as the starvation-stricken Zamzam camp.
The US on January 7, 2025, declared that the RSF is violating the following articles of the Genocide Convention: Article II (a): Killing members of the group, (b): Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group, (c): Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part, (d): Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.
Over 30 million people in Sudan need humanitarian aid. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have aggravated the famine by barring all international and UN aid workers from Darfur in October 2024. The SAF and allied militias have massacred thousands of Sudanese.
The RSF is continuing its attacks on the people of Darfur, especially the Masalit. In Darfur, the Rapid Support Forces have murdered well over 30,000 Masalit, raped thousands of women, and driven tens of thousands of Masalit into Chad. Masalit towns have been destroyed, their wells poisoned, their streets strewn with corpses. The RSF has surrounded El Fasher, a city of 2.5 million, capital of Darfur. In April 2025, the RSF massacred over one hundred people in El Fasher according to the UN.
In June 2024, the UN Security Council passed UN Security Council Resolution 2736 which called for a ceasefire, lifting of the RSF siege, and delivery of humanitarian aid to El Fasher. But it set no deadline for concluding a ceasefire, authorized no enforcement mission, ignored violations of the arms embargo on Darfur by the UAE, Russia, Turkey, and others, and failed to authorize arrests of generals and others charged by the ICC. Written by the UK, UNSC resolution 2736 is toothless.
The Alliance Against Genocide/IRF Genocide Working Group has drafted a UNSC resolution to reestablish UNAMID with 10,000 troops and 715 police authorized to arrest persons indicted by the ICC. The draft resolution would:
Declare the war in Sudan is a threat to international peace and security.
Authorize a UN/AU Peacekeeping Force (PKO) under Chapter 7 of the UN Charter.
Call on African Union countries to provide thousands of troops for the PKO.
Make the PKO an ordinary expense of the UN, obligating all UN members to pay for it.
Give the PKO the mandate is to protect civilians and end the civil war by diplomacy or force.
Refer the situation in all of Sudan to the International Criminal Court (ICC).
Give the PKO police authorization to arrest any persons charged with war crimes, crimes against humanity, or genocide by the ICC.
The UK “holds the pen” for UN Security Council Resolutions on Sudan.
No Security Council members have agreed to introduce a tough resolution like the Genocide Working Group draft resolution. Their excuse is that “the UK holds the pen.” Diplomatic niceties seem to outweigh the lives of people in Sudan.
The UK’s past failure to prevent genocide in Sudan.
The UK has a history of failing to hold Sudan’s leadership to account for genocide and crimes against humanity.
During the height of the first Darfur genocide in 2003-2006, the then UK ambassador William Patey effusively pledged the UK’s friendship to an audience of Sudanese politicians and businessmen in Khartoum, despite al-Bashir’s genocidal campaign against black Africans being well under way across Darfur.
In the 2010s, the appeasement of Sudan’s genocidists took the form of the UK government’s support for businesses closely connected to the al-Bashir regime.
Today, the UK continues to prioritize commercial interests over its duty to prevent genocide in Sudan by refusing to sanction the UAE for funding and arming the RSF.
The UAE’s complicity in this genocide is well documented by UN experts, who reported in January 2024 that weapons and ammunitions shipments were being sent to the RSF by the UAE via Chad.
By maintaining economic ties with the UAE and refusing to follow the US’s lead in sanctioning RSF companies that operate there, the UK benefits from the genocide in Sudan.
The UK is failing to meet its obligations under the Genocide Convention.
The UK has stated that it will wait for the ICC to make a determination of genocide in Sudan. However, the 1948 Genocide Convention states that governments, not courts, should regularly assess the risk of genocide and use “all means reasonably available” to prevent it.
The governments of Canada, the US, France, Germany, New Zealand, and the Netherlands have all made declarations that genocide is underway in Sudan without any ICC determination.
On the 28th of October 2024, UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy stated that only an appropriate court may deem a situation to constitute genocide, even when “millions of people have lost their lives”.
This British approach to genocide recognition violates the Genocide Convention by failing to prevent genocide as required by Article One of the Convention and the opinion of the International Court of Justice in Bosnia v Serbia.
UK sponsored resolutions on Sudan in the UN Security Council have all failed to call for the use of force to stop the genocide in Sudan. A UK resolution in December 2024 that only called for more humanitarian aid was even vetoed by Russia.
The refusal by the UK to declare that genocide is occurring in Sudan is genocide denial.
So long as the UK refuses to declare that the massacres in Sudan constitute genocide, the UK’s words of condemnation are empty excuses for the UK’s refusal to support forceful collective action to stop this genocide.
Even if vetoed by Russia in the UNSC, the UN General Assembly could recommend collective action under the Uniting for Peace resolution.
Refusal to call the massacres in Sudan “genocide” emboldens the Rapid Support Forces and Sudanese Armed Forces to kill with impunity.
Hindering prevention, the UK is enabling further genocide in Sudan.
The UK’s support for the UAE makes the UK complicit in the Sudanese genocide.
When will the U.K. stop denying the genocide in Sudan?
When will the U.K. and African Union lead a collective intervention to stop it?
Dr. Gregory Stanton is Founding President of Genocide Watch and Chair of the Alliance Against Genocide. He was a Research Professor in Genocide Studies at George Mason University and was the James Farmer Professor in Human Rights at the University of Mary Washington. He founded the Cambodian Genocide Project in 1982. In the State Department, he drafted the UN Security Council Resolutions that established the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. He wrote the rules of procedure for the Khmer Rouge Tribunal. He holds degrees from Oberlin College, Harvard Divinity School, Yale Law School, and a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago.