Whistleblower says UK Foreign Office ‘censored’ warning of Sudan genocide
A whistle-blower inside the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) has revealed that officials knew of the risk of genocide in Sudan before the civil war erupted, but deliberately suppressed the information.
According to the report published by the Guardian on Wednesday, an FCDO threat analyst was prevented from issuing an alert that genocide could occur in Darfur.
The warning was blocked from inclusion in a humanitarian risk assessment compiled just days after Sudan’s violent civil war broke out in April 2023.
“The word ‘genocide’ was removed from our report. Anyone who has studied Sudan, its patterns of behavior, knew genocide was a risk,” said the analyst, who has produced frequent assessments for the FCDO.
The censorship is particularly troubling as the UK is the UN Security Council’s “penholder” on Sudan, responsible for leading the council’s actions on the conflict.
A former FCDO official associated with the department’s atrocity prevention team told the Guardian that difficulties raising atrocity concerns in Darfur mirrored challenges they faced flagging human rights violations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).
DRC atrocity assessments, the official added, were “dropped for political reasons,” noting that “that pattern of behavior looks to have been repeated for Sudan.”
By the time the April 2023 report warning of genocide was finalized, ethnic violence was already sweeping through Darfur.
Two months later, the RSF carried out genocide in the Darfuri city of El Geneina. The UN estimates that approximately 15,000 members of non-Arab and ethnic African communities were killed.
The threat analyst revealed that even after the atrocities in El Geneina, the FCDO continued to prohibit the use of the word genocide in risk assessments.
El Fasher, another regional capital in Darfur, fell to the RSF last month, triggering a wave of systematic mass killings.
Although the UN, major human rights organizations, and the international community have formally recognized that genocide has been carried out in Sudan by the RSF, the UK has refused to do the same, effectively shielding both its ally and itself from accountability.
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