00:00Well, after widespread alarm about the humanitarian situation in Sudan's Darfur region, the International Criminal Court confirmed earlier this week that atrocities committed by the paramilitary rapid support forces could indeed constitute war crimes.
00:13The comments came after the Humanitarian Research Lab, housed at the Yale School of Public Health, published a series of reports about RSF attacks, mass killings, and now body disposals in Al-Fasher.
00:26With few sources of independent information remaining in the now paramilitary-controlled city, much of what has come out is based on analysis of open-source data, including satellite imagery.
00:36For more, Nathaniel Raymond joins us on the program from New Haven.
00:38He is the executive director, then, of the Humanitarian Research Lab.
00:42Thank you so much for joining us today, Nathaniel.
00:45So, to get started, Yale's Research Lab, Humanitarian Research Lab, is, of course, at the forefront of using open-source data to uncover human rights abuses.
00:55Can you talk a little bit more about the methods you use?
00:58Why focus on this approach?
01:02Well, the fact is, many of the places we're trying to access, we cannot get on the ground.
01:07So, in non-permissive environments, the combination of satellite imagery and open-source intelligence is the only way, in many cases, to figure out what's going on.
01:17In the case of Al-Fasher, there's been a comms blackout for weeks now, and we can't reach anyone on the ground.
01:24So, in the absence of satellite imagery, we have no way to verify what's happening.
01:28So, can you tell us more, then, about the findings themselves?
01:31I mean, in a rather macabre timeline, you've been able to document everything from population movements, or a lack thereof, to evidence of mass killings, and now, most recently, of mass graves.
01:42Well, what we're able to see in Al-Fasher is really house-to-house killing, combined with the concealment of bodies and mass graves throughout the last two neighborhoods in which civilians have been sheltering during the 18-month siege.
02:03And that's the neighborhood here of Darajula, where we see a mosque with a mass grave near it.
02:10And here is evidence of potential human remains near the earthen wall, we call the berm, that the rapid support forces have built to wall in the city.
02:22And so, the city is now surrounded by nine-foot earthen walls, which prevent people from escaping.
02:27And so, what we're seeing is a population caught in what we call a kill box.
02:33They've been starved for 15 months, and now they're being shot on site.
02:38So, I know there are a few independent observers or journalists left in Al-Fasher, but to what extent are you able to have some sort of verification by people on the ground of the information that you've been able to gather through these open source and satellite analyses?
02:54None.
02:55None.
02:55This is a genocide.
02:56None.
02:56This is a genocide.
02:57On Monday of last week, local sources on the ground told us they had lost 1,200 people in their community.
03:04By that evening, they said it was 10,000.
03:06By Tuesday, we couldn't get them on the phone.
03:10Eight agencies in the United Nations have not been able to reach their staff, and now almost 12 days.
03:16And so, we are facing a situation in Al-Fasher where we just don't see where approximately the 200,000 people remaining in the city have gone, except for objects consistent with human dimensions seen on the street.
03:33So, if I'm hearing you correctly, Nathaniel, it essentially sounds that without the work of the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab at this stage, the world would know almost nothing of the situation that's playing out currently in Al-Fasher, Sudan.
03:46Unfortunately, yes.
03:50Now, you've been warning, nonetheless, the international community since July of 2023, over two years ago, that massacres, as we're seeing them today, were very well likely to happen.
04:01What did you see back then that made what we see happening today feel already at that stage that it was inevitable?
04:06Well, we saw three things.
04:10One is we saw the Rapid Support Forces taking the crossroad towns that would be necessary if you were going to surround Al-Fasher, and that includes Zelenji, Qas, and Nyala.
04:23The second thing we saw is Sudan Armed Forces, we could watch from space as they repositioned in the summer of 2023 as if they expected to be attacked in Al-Fasher from the south.
04:35The third thing we saw was in the early spring, late winter of 2024, during the dry season, we saw arson attacks by Rapid Support Forces-aligned militias that were beginning to burn the farms that fed Al-Fasher.
04:53And that was the point we knew that the attack was imminent.
04:56Now, you've made very clear that your intelligence is crucial, the work, rather, of the Yale Humanitarian Lab at large.
05:03It's cited in almost every article or news segment about the situation there.
05:08But do you feel like the work that you're doing is making a difference when it comes to concrete reactions from stakeholders at this stage?
05:16Like I said, we've seen this timeline, the preparation for the massacres, the massacres, and now the mass graves.
05:21What has changed in the meantime?
05:25Unfortunately, nothing.
05:26Everything is going forward as we predicted.
05:33And what we predicted is that the international community would fail to act for one simple reason.
05:38As we know from the Wall Street Journal last week, U.S. intelligence has confirmed that the United Arab Emirates are arming the Rapid Support Forces, including in Al-Fasher.
05:48And the reason these people are dying is because the United States, the United Kingdom, and Europe have prioritized their diplomatic and security relationship with the UAE over the lives of these people.
06:00And so, unfortunately, there is nothing surprising here.
06:05We've had incredible attention on our reporting, but we have not yet moved the needle on protecting these civilians.
06:12Realistically, then, I mean, if you were a policymaker or the leader of a major stakeholder, what should be done now?
06:22It's hard to imagine that sanctions would change anything.
06:25We've seen them really fail to produce any significant effects on the diplomatic situations in places like Russia, I think with Iran as well.
06:34So what would work immediately?
06:36To quote the hip-hop classic, if I ruled the world, what I would do is I would put fixed-wing drones visibly over the city and give an ultimatum to the Rapid Support Forces that they have to let the U.N. in and they have to exit the city or else there would be kinetic consequences.
06:59Short of sanctions on the United Arab Emirates and direct denunciation by the United States, the only thing that will turn Rapid Support Forces around now is a kinetic threat, i.e. something that can shoot at them.
07:13At this point, given the fact we briefed the U.N. Security Council first in July of 2023 and said they had to deploy peacekeepers urgently or these people would be killed, there's no one coming to save them.
07:26As a final question for you, Nathaniel, are we yet again witnessing the failure simply of what is supposedly an international rules-based order?
07:37I mean, in the past two years alone, we've seen the world seemingly powerless to stop what's happening in Ukraine, in Gaza, now clearly in Sudan.
07:46If this is the failure of the rules-based order as we've known it since the Second World War, what alternatives, if any, are there?
07:52You're asking the critical question.
07:57The fact of the matter is that a lot more than civilians are dying at Al-Fasher.
08:03What's dying at Al-Fasher is any pretense by the international community that we act to prevent genocide.
08:10This is the final battle of the Darfur genocide that began in 2003 and 2005.
08:14Back then, there were lawn signs, there were students chanting in the streets, there were celebrities getting arrested at the embassy in Washington for Sudan.
08:24Now, there's silence.
08:26And I'm reminded by Frederick Douglass, who said, power concedes nothing without a demand.
08:31Here, there is no demand to protect these people.
08:34And until there is, they'll continue to die.
08:36Nathaniel Raymond of the Humanitarian Research Lab at Yale, thank you so much for your time today and, of course, to your teams as well, for all of the very critical work that you continue to do.
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