Opinion Today: A tragedy is unfolding, and the world needs to pay attention

Nick Kristof on his latest reporting from the Chad-Sudan border.

View in browser|nytimes.com September 23, 2024 By Nicholas Kristof Opinion Columnist Two decades ago I was seared by what I saw while covering the genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. Men and boys were slaughtered, women and girls raped, villages torched — but at least the world responded to these horrors. Senators like Joe Biden and Barack Obama demanded that President George W. Bush act more firmly. College students held protests. The United Nations sent a peacekeeping force. All this worked: Hundreds of thousands of lives were saved. Yet when I visited the area again this month, reporting near the Chad-Sudan border (the warring parties barred me from entering Darfur), what I found was shattering. Atrocities have resumed and famine is spreading. And this time, the world is largely silent, in ways that create impunity and aggravate the crisis. In my column last week, I wrote about a woman named Maryam Suleiman who recounted how her five brothers were lined up and executed one by one. Women and girls were then confined to a corral to be raped. And in my latest column over the weekend, I spoke with survivors whose stories showed how mass rape is driving famine in the region: When men go to the fields to plant or harvest, they are murdered. When women go, they are raped. So people cannot farm, and their children starve. World leaders are gathering in New York this week for the United Nations General Assembly, and I'm hoping that President Biden and others will belatedly wake up and work harder to stop this cataclysm. As leaders sit down at the U.N. to banquets celebrating their humanitarianism, may they understand that their passivity empowers perpetrators and at some point becomes complicity. Read the columns: Ivor Prickett for The New York Times Nicholas Kristof When Gunmen Impose a Policy of Rape At the U.N., will President Biden and other world leaders stand up for the victims or for the countries fueling war, rape and hunger? By Nicholas Kristof Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Nicholas Kristof I Just Went to Darfur. Here Is What Shattered Me. "So many men were killed, like grains of sand," says one survivor. By Nicholas Kristof Here's what we're focusing on today: Editors' Picks Frank Bruni 'I Cannot Have That Man Be My Governor': Inside Josh Stein's Bid to Beat Mark Robinson in North Carolina Josh Stein is fighting to prevent a MAGA takeover of North Carolina. By Frank Bruni More From Opinion Guest Essay Putin Is Doing Something Almost Nobody Is Noticing It's not just opposition figures who are caught in the Kremlin's dragnet. 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