Nicholas Kristof on the Front Lines of the World’s Deadliest Crises

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Now, to the growing humanitarian crisis in Sudan, Nicholas Kristof is a New York Times columnist who has long covered foreign issues. He joins Michel Martin to discuss his reporting from Sudan and what he calls a discouraging lack of global attention to the catastrophe.

 

MICHEL MARTIN: Nick Kristof, thank you so much for joining us once again.

 

NICHOLAS KRISTOF: Good to be with you.

 

MARTIN: You have spent, I don’t know, decades reporting on conflicts, humanitarian crises. Recently, you’ve been reporting on Sudan. You say it’s the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. You’re not the only person who said that and yet it does not seem to be penetrating the world’s consciousness the way other crises have in the past and in fact, even the way other crises are now. And I just wonder why you think that is.

 

KRISTOF: You know, Michel, I just find it so discouraging because 20 years ago, there really was a global outcry about the Darfur genocide and it made a difference. I mean, there are hundreds of thousands of people who are alive today because there were protests on American universities, because there was pressure from the administration at the time. And this time we have another huge crisis again with mass murder, mass rape, with starvation, and we have the sound of silence You know, in fact, I think this time it might even be easier to – for public pressure to have an impact because the United Arab Emirates is funding one of the militias that is particularly responsible for atrocities. The US under both Trump and Biden said that that militia was committing genocide. And I think the UAE is embarrassable. I think that if there were an outcry, it would withdraw the support from that militia, or at least insist that it withdraw. And yet, we have been unwilling to use that leverage, either the administration or the public as a whole. And so people are dying every day.

 

MARTIN: Give me a sense of the scope of the problem. I’ve reported on this. I had the opportunity to get to, at least to the border of Sudan, you know, traveling through Chad. And I, you know, at the time I went, gosh, maybe two years ago, there were already millions of people who had been displaced. And now at this point, what is it, something like 14 million people have been displaced by the war both internally and externally? I mean, give us a sense of from your reporting. 

 

KRISTOF: I mean one of the challenges, frankly, Michel, is that it is now very difficult to access and so we have fewer people on the ground, either journalists or aid workers in some of the crucial areas. But the slaughter has gone on, the mass rape has gone on, and the starvation has has intensified kind of in waves. It has also moved south. At that time, when you were there, it was mostly focused on violence in the Darfur region. Now it has moved somewhat south. And in particular, I think the crisis of the moment is that the Rapid Support Forces, the militia I was mentioning, it has largely surrounded the city of El-Obeid and kind of south of Darfur and is threatening to overrun it. It’s hard to know exactly what would happen, but when the RSF militia overran the city of El-Fasher late last year, the estimates are that 60,000 people were slaughtered in a few weeks. 

 

MARTIN: In your July 11th column, you wrote, “Let’s name the country that’s financing mass murder.” And you argue that many governments are reluctant to publicly identify the United Arab Emirates as the principle backer of this militant group, the Rapid Support Forces or RSF. So a couple of questions about this. First of all, how do you know that the UAE is backing the RSF and why are they?

 

KRISTOF: So it’s an open secret that there has been a pipeline of arms from the UAE to the RSF militia. The planes from the UAE have been tracked. The weapons that the RSF has have originated in the UAE. Officials talk about it openly, both UN officials, American officials. The Biden administration talked privately to the UAE, but would not speak publicly about it. And they claim that they had promises that the UAE was gonna back off. And in fact, that didn’t happen. And, you know, the UAE is an important country. And the US well, the Biden administration wanted as part of a major peace deal with Israel. President Trump has major business interests, family business interests with the UAE. Other countries in Europe have important business ties with the UAE. And so they prioritize that relationship with the UAE, which means they’ve been unwilling to speak publicly about its role arming the RSF.

 

And, you know, this is the leverage we have. The UAE has a lot to be proud of. It’s an extraordinary country. But when it arms a militia that is engaged in mass – I mean, I visited villages and I’m sure you heard these testimonies on your trip – that line up every man or every boy over the age of 10 and they gun them down. And then they kidnap and rape the women and even young girls. And this is the modus operandi that they have pursued both 20 years ago in the Darfur genocide, and that they started again against three particular Black African tribes in the Darfur region in particular.

 

MARTIN: What’s the UAE’s goal here? What is the purpose of this? 

 

KRISTOF: So I think there are two or maybe two and a half reasons for its role. One is that it does have mineral interests, gold and others, and it is getting, extracting that gold under the RSF areas and getting it back to the UAE. And that is a reasonable economic gain for it. 

And the second is that it is seeking influence around the region. And it, other countries, including Saudi Arabia, have backed the Sudanese Armed Forces, the other major force in the Civil War. And the UAE, in turn is backing the RSF militia. And whoever wins that Civil War will control the future of Sudan. So the UAE is making a bet on its long-term influence. And I think the, maybe the half reason is that at this point, it is so committed to the RSF that if it were to back down, then the other side, the Sudanese armed forces would emerge victorious perhaps, and then it would be – or it fears that it would be – isolated from influence in Sudan for years to come. And so it goes on funding the RSF, arming it, and complicit in mass murder.

 

MARTIN: What convinces you that, that it would make a difference if governments were to, I don’t know, name and shame the UAE for this or put pressure on the UAE? What convinces you that that would matter?

 

KRISTOF: So the UAE cares deeply about its international image. It’s quite proud of it. It invests a lot of money in burnishing that image around the world. It has these sports teams that it owns around the world. And we also know that a half dozen years ago, it was engaged in a brutal war in Yemen, which at that time was the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. And there was an outcry over that and it wasn’t, frankly, all that serious an outcry. It wasn’t that the UAE was gonna be stigmatized or even really lose its access to American weapons. But that outcry and that pressure and that international embarrassment was enough to get the UAE to withdraw from that Yemen Civil War and, you know, somewhat improve the situation in Yemen so that it’s not now the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. That’s now Sudan.

So we have seen the UAE responding to that international pressure. And I think that, you know, pressure this time would make a real difference. And it’s probably not gonna come from President Trump, especially given his business interests there. But I think Europe can do much, much more to speak out. I think the public can.

 

MARTIN: I wanted to turn to another story that you’ve been covering, your reporting on USAID. In recent weeks, you’ve written about a young girl in Uganda who died of malaria after bed nets and medicine ran out. A pregnant woman in Liberia who died because an ambulance had no fuel. You wrote about an eight-year-old girl in South Sudan who lost access to HIV medication. I think people have been reporting on sort of the macro impact of this abrupt cut in USAID, which was one of the first targets of that Elon Musk. They called it the Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. USAID was one of the first targets. I mean, they made a big sort of point of going out and, like, chiseling the letters off of the building front. Why was it important to you to sort of focus on these individual stories?

 

KRISTOF: We’re not hardwired to have empathy for mass casualties. But I think it is human to have a certain amount of empathy for a child in front of us, for somebody else. And I don’t think that the American public appreciates, you know, how many children are dying unnecessarily, how many women are dying in childbirth unnecessarily because of these steps that we’ve taken. 

 

You know, USAID was saving one life every 10 seconds, until Elon Musk came along, at a cost of 23 cents for every $100 of national income. That seems to me a bargain. You mentioned this woman in Uganda, and that, this left a deep impression on me. I happened to drop in on this village quite randomly. I asked about people who died recently. And this woman, Yamah Freeman, she was a, she had two small children. She was pregnant again. She was in obstructed labor. And so she desperately needed medical attention and a C-section. And so the villagers called the local hospital and said, you know, we need ambulance to take Yamah to the hospital. And the hospital said, Well yes, the US has provided these ambulances and used to provide fuel, but the US has cut off fuel supplies because of the destruction of USAID, so we don’t have any fuel. So if somebody can come here and give us diesel for the ambulance, we can send the ambulance to your village. 

 

Well, that wasn’t possible, obviously. And so they put Yamah in a hammock as she’s bleeding to death. And the strongest young men in the village put her on their shoulders and they race 10 miles down this dirt path toward the hospital. And they’re shouting, you know, “Yama, you know, hang in there. You’ll be okay. You’ll make it. ” She didn’t. She bled to death en route. And they turned around and trudged back to the village and buried her there. 

 

And you know, I mean, Michel, any of us, if we came across a woman who was dying in the back of an ambulance, because the ambulance who ran out of fuel, of course, we would step in and hand over $10 or $20 or whatever it might be for fuel to save that woman’s life. But Yamah died because we didn’t think it was worth it to provide fuel for that ambulance. And I would hope that when we think of it in those micro terms, we might feel a little more empathy and a little more compassion.

 

MARTIN: A Boston University analysis estimates that these cuts have already contributed to more than 750,000 deaths. There was a Lancet study that projects 9.4 million deaths by 2030 if the current trends continue. But it’s interesting that Elon Musk, who is kind of the author of this project, has repeatedly insisted that no children have died because of the USAID cuts. And it’s interesting that Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, in congressional testimony, insisted that nobody has died as a result of these cuts. And I just wonder, you know, how do you understand that?

 

KRISTOF: I mean, it’s ludicrous to claim that no one has died. We don’t know whether these larger estimates are necessarily accurate. And one reason we don’t know that is that one of the things that Rubio and Musk cut out was the data collection efforts to determine mortality in these countries. But we do know that it’s a very large number, you know, hundreds of thousands so far. And, you know, one way I know that is just when I travel village to village, you see kids who have died. And every village you go to, you know, there will be this kid died because they couldn’t get a new bed net to keep malaria at bay. A bednet cost $2. This kid got malaria and couldn’t get anti-malaria medicines, which would cost maybe a half dozen dollars. And then to have Rubio or Musk deny this impact just adds insult to injury.

 

MARTIN: But what about the American interests part? Can you speak to that? I mean, part of, you know, their argument was that this is not in the interest of the United States, that these resources, you know, however laudatory should be spent in the United States and not overseas. So what would you say to that?

 

KRISTOF: So I think we have interests as well as values at stake. And I think our interests are reflected in two particularly important ways. One is the accumulation of soft power so that we have influence at the UN, we have influence in trade discussions. And the other, I think, is health surveillance. So one of the really important things that USAID did was have a presence and be alert for diseases like Ebola for controlling tuberculosis in the field. You know, when you get a case of extremely drug-resistant TB come to the US, it costs half a million dollars to treat it. It’s much cheaper and more cost-effective to deal with these diseases in other countries. 

 

And, you know, the emergence of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, I think, underscores that. Because we had shut down USAID in these areas, we didn’t have an ear on the ground. It took a long time for us to detect those cases of Ebola. And as a result, it is, you know, instead of being extinguished in one village in a few weeks, we will probably be fighting Ebola there for a year or more, and many people will die unnecessarily.

 

MARTIN: Before we let you go, I wanna ask about another piece of reporting that you did this year. An investigation into allegations of sexual violence against Palestinians in Israeli detention. It generated, I don’t know, an extraordinary reaction from, I would say, pretty much across the political spectrum. In a way it is kind of of a piece with the other stories we’ve been talking about. I mean, you’re talking about – we’re talking about conditions that are extreme, that are causing extreme suffering, that you feel are, that your reporting says and that your observation says are just, are not being taken seriously by much of the world. And I just wonder, you know, do you have some conclusion that you draw from it, from the experience that you had in that investigation?

 

KRISTOF: I mean, the Times has been great and standing behind that. You know, we knew it was gonna be a controversial article going into it. I’m not sure that we expected that Prime Minister Netanyahu would call it a blood libel and threaten harsh legal reaction. I mean, you know, the reaction was enormous. But at the end of the day, Michel, I mean, our job as journalists is to go and cover things without fear or favor. And I absolutely am confident in that story. I talked to 14 people who had experienced sexual violence at the hands of Israeli authorities or settlers. And then the UN then followed up shortly thereafter actually by putting Israel on a list for the first time of countries that do engage in this kind of sexual violence.

 

I, you know, all we can do is shine a light and hope that it gets attention and that it will raise the cost of this behavior down the road. And I, you know, I wish that Prime Minister Netanyahu would’ve spent less time denouncing me and denouncing the story and a little more time investigating the reports of sexual violence, including from Israeli human rights people. And even more, then allowing the Red Cross to visit prisoners, Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons. And if he thinks that he will be exonerated, all the more reason to allow the Red Cross to interview those prisoners.

 

MARTIN: Nick Kristof, thank you so much for talking with us.

 

KRISTOF: Good to be with you.

 

GOLODRYGA: We should note that in a statement posted online last year, the United Arab Emirates denied the allegations, saying in part, the UAE unequivocally condemns the horrific attacks against civilians in Sudan. The statement goes on to say, the UAE has consistently called for a full arms embargo across Sudan. As evidenced by the latest U.N. Panel of Experts’ report published in April 2025, there is no substantiated evidence that the UAE has provided any support to the RSF or any warring parties. Claims suggesting otherwise are an attempt to misrepresent the facts and distract from the urgent need for a ceasefire and for accountability among those perpetrating violence on the ground.