COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — Seated on a platform outside a regional post office in Sri Lanka’s former war zone, about 150 miles north of the capital, Colombo, a mother whose son has been missing for seven years sobbed as she spoke. “All we are asking for is for them to give us our children back. They took my child,” the aggrieved mother, Sangarappillai Vanalochini, said in an interview widely viewed on television and social media in Sri Lanka this week. For four days, Ms. Vanalochini has refused food and water, joining 13 other people on a hunger strike in the northern town of Vavuniya, only a few miles away from the center of some of the most brutal fighting during Sri Lanka’s 26-year civil war, which ended in 2009. She and the others fasting are trying to force the government to investigate what happened to family members who disappeared during the conflict in which Tamil Tiger rebels fought for a separate state for the Tamil minority in the island nation’s north and east. The condition of the hunger strikers grew so grave on Thursday that Sri Lanka’s state defense minister, Ruwan Wijewardene, flew from the capital to meet them. The strikers agreed on Thursday evening to call off their fast after he promised in writing to ensure “a proper response on Feb. 9 through a meeting between the families of the disappeared and a delegation of government ministers and officials at the office of the prime minister,” said Ruki Fernando, an activist who has been in regular contact with the families. If the response is not satisfactory at that meeting, “the families have said they will restart a larger fast unto death,” he said. The state defense minister could not immediately be reached for comment. The government under the former president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, defeated the Tamil rebels, ending the civil war in a surge of violence. Amnesty International estimates that 60,000 to 100,000 people are still missing from two communist insurgencies and the long war with the Tamil Tiger rebels. The current president, Maithripala Sirisena, was elected to office in a stunning upset in 2015, to a great extent on the promise of promoting justice and reconciliation, including an investigation into the disappearances during the war. But little progress has been made in the two years since he took office. Human rights groups say that many of the thousands who disappeared were abducted by military units and paramilitary groups, while some who surrendered to government forces at the end of the conflict never came home. Canagasabapathy Viswa-lingam Wigneswaran, the chief minister for the Tamil-majority Northern Province, said in a letter to Mr. Sirisena this week that the Tamil people had placed “tremendous expectations and hope” in Mr. Sirisena in 2015 and helped to elect him to office. “Those hopes seem to be eroding in recent times,” he said in the letter. A Tamil member of Parliament, S. Sivamohan, said that Tamils had grown increasingly frustrated at the lack of progress. He noted that the Sirisena government passed a law to set up a permanent office last August to investigate disappearances. But six months later, the office has yet to be constituted. “All the initiatives of the government remain on paper, there has been nothing evident in practice,” Dr. Sivamohan said. A spokesman for Mr. Sirisena declined to comment. Mr. Fernando, the activist, said that the strikers had expressed deep frustration at the beginning of their fast, and that years of protests, petitions, complaints and testimony had yielded nothing. “If the government is serious about postwar reconciliation, it’s time to move beyond rhetoric,” he said. _______________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times Company

Claiming that Aung San Suu Kyi has chosen to turn a blind eye to the genocide taking place in her country to retain her political power, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Iran's Shirin Ebadi today said that their fellow laureate has sold her soul to the devil. The laureate came up with this remark at a programme titled 'Combating Violence Against Women and Advancing Women's Rights' arranged by Naripokkho and Nobel Women's Initiatives in the city where she and another Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Northern Ireland's Mairead Maguire talked to female reporters of the country. "When Aung San Suu Kyi was under house arrest, Mairead and I staged several campaigns in order to secure her release, we even staged demonstration outside the Myanmar Embassy in Washingtong," she said adding, "However, unfortunately, when she was released from the house arrest she sold her soul to the devil." Shirin said she, as a Muslim laureate, has written several open letters to Suu Kyi saying that her silence is shameful. "I urged her to take a stance breaking her silence, but Suu Kyi didn't reply to any of them." Suu Kyi appears to have forgotten how she suffered when she was under house arrest. Now the Rohingya Muslims are suffering at least ten times more than any of her sufferings but she wants to hold on her political power, she added. Urging for a peaceful solution,Mairead Maguire said dialogue and diplomacy are very important to solve the Rohingya crisis and the role played by Bangladesh is a model for the world. She and the two other laureates will hopefully further detect the genocide of Rohingya people to the ICC and encourage the other countries to support Bangladesh for their inspirational works in the crisis, added the laureate. She said it is also important to focus on the need of having dialogue and listening to each other to bring peace, while everybody, including the governments, has a role to play here. Claiming that they have the evidence that the Rohingya issue is genocide, Mairead said their next course of programme is to identify interested states through the UN who can take the Myanmar government to the ICC. "We want to find states that have passion for human rights and justice," she added. However, the three Nobel laureates -- Tawakkol Karman of Yemen, Shirin Ebadi of Iran and Mairead Maguire of Northern Ireland -- came to Bangladesh on a week-long visit to see the Rohingya situation on the ground. The Nobel Women's Initiative in collaboration with its partner in Bangladesh, Naripokkho, led the delegation to Bangladesh to better understand the situation of the Rohingya refugees and the two laureates except Tawakkol Karman joined the programme to share their experiences with some of the female journalists of the country. http://www.thedailystar.net/rohingya-crisis/suu-kyi-sold-her-soul-devil-nobel-laureate-shirin-ebadi-1541992 (c) 2018 The Daily Star

By Denis Dumo April 25, 2018-JUBA (Reuters) - South Sudan President Salva Kiir has rejected opposition calls for him to resign as part of efforts to end a civil war, accusing anti-government groups of making “unreasonable demands” in peace talks. Despite several agreements and ceasefires, fighting has rumbled on in South Sudan with barely any break since it first erupted in 2013, just two years after independence, killing tens of thousands. In talks in the Ethiopian capital Addis Ababa led by East African bloc IGAD, 10 opposition groups last month demanded Kiir step aside. They also want a transitional parliament dissolved and replaced by a new one formed with less than 200 members. “The people who are fighting with us have unreasonable conditions to make peace,” Kiir said during a ceremony for his deceased army chief, General James Ajongo Mawut late on Tuesday. “They think that I am the obstacle to peace and if I am removed after signing the Agreement then there will be no problem,” he added. “They want me to sign the agreement and then step down immediately. Just imagine, what is my incentive in bringing peace if it is peace that I will bring and then I step aside? Nobody can do it. Bashir (Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir) didn’t do it when we are fighting with them.” The government and rebel groups signed the latest ceasefire in December in Addis Ababa, aiming to revive a pact reached in 2015. But the truce was violated within hours. Another series of talks that were scheduled for this week were postponed, and are now expected to take place in early May. Civil war first erupted when troops loyal to Kiir clashed with forces loyal to Riek Machar, then the vice president. Tens of thousands of people have been killed and much of the nation has faced dire food shortages. IGAD said last month Machar should be released from house arrest in South Africa as soon as possible, on condition that he renounces violence. The fighting has slashed oil production and driven about a third of the population of 12 million from their homes. The U.N. refugee agency estimates 3.1 million will be refugees in neighboring countries by the end of this year. Kiir also dismissed calls to dissolve the parliament. “If we were to sign an agreement, the agreement has to be endorsed by the parliament so that it is passed into law. If the parliament is dissolved then what do we do with the agreement?” he said. “We will not work for such thing.” © 2018 | Reuters

Paul Rusesabagina went from the world’s most famous Rwandan to a prisoner of his political nemesis, President Paul Kagame, whose government accuses the coolheaded hotelier of murder, arson and terrorism. By Abdi Latif Dahir, Declan Walsh, Matina Stevis-Gridneff and Ruth Maclean Published by The New York Times on September 18, 2020. Updated on September 20, 2020. Police escorting Mr. Rusesabagina into a van after his pre-trial court appearance. [Cyril Ndegeya for The New York Times] KIGALI, Rwanda — As the manager of a five-star hotel where 1,268 people sheltered from the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Paul Rusesabagina was known for his cool head — a quality that kept the killers at bay, helped ensure that all his guests survived, and led to an Oscar-nominated movie, “Hotel Rwanda,” that brought his story to a global audience. Now Mr. Rusesabagina is back in Rwanda, but this time under arrest, in a spartan cell in Kigali’s central police station, where he sleeps in a simple bed draped in a mosquito net. He still cuts the figure of an unruffled hotelier — pressed blazer, white shirt, polished loafers — even as he wrestled with how to explain the latest twists of a life story that threatens to outdo even its Hollywood version. Not long ago Mr. Rusesabagina, 66, was the toast of America, feted by Oprah Winfrey, awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom and earning large fees for his speeches around the world — a human rights icon who warned about the horrors of genocide and offered a living example of standing up to it. Now he finds himself in a country he vowed never to return to, at the mercy of a president who pursued him for 13 years, and preparing to stand trial for murder, arson and terrorism. “How I got here — now that is a surprise,” he said with a wry smile, in a jailhouse interview this past week, with two Rwandan government officials in the room. “I was actually not coming here.” The tale of how a Hollywood hero went from celebrity human rights ambassador to prisoner speaks to the predicament of Rwanda, the small African country where as many as one million people died in 1994 in a grotesque massacre that became the shame of a world that did not intervene to stop it. A quarter century on, the genocide still casts a long shadow inside Rwanda, where the truth about how it unfolded is bitterly contested. In the aftermath, Rwanda was stabilized under the firm hand of Paul Kagame, a rebel leader turned president who became the darling of guilt-ridden Western countries. Mr. Kagame won powerful allies, like Bill Gates, Tony Blair, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Donors lavished aid on his government, which cut poverty, grew the economy and promoted women leaders. Now, Rwanda is also known as an authoritarian state where Mr. Kagame exerts total control, his troops are accused of plunder and massacres in neighboring Congo, and political rivals are imprisoned, subjected to sham trials or die in mysterious circumstances at home and abroad. Foremost among those critics is Mr. Rusesabagina, who leveraged his celebrity as the world’s most famous Rwandan to launch scathing attacks on Mr. Kagame, gradually transforming from activist to opponent to, as the government now alleges, a supporter of armed struggle. Mr. Rusesabagina was a leader of a coalition of opposition groups, all in exile, that includes an armed wing. In an address to those groups in 2018, recorded in a video now widely circulated by the government, Mr. Rusesabagina says that politics has failed in Rwanda. “The time for us has come to use any means possible to bring about change,” he said. “It is time to attempt our last resort.” From prison, he said his group’s role was not fighting, but “diplomacy” to represent the millions of Rwandan refugees and exiles. “We are not a terrorist organization,” he said. Experts say his situation is emblematic of Rwanda under Mr. Kagame: As the ruling party totally dominates the political space, some exiled opponents have turned to more extreme measures. “Coming on the heels of something as horrific as 1994, foreigners often want to paint the situation in black and white, good and bad, with heroes and demons,” said Anna Cave, a former National Security Council director for African Affairs under President Barack Obama. “But it’s more nuanced today. There are a lot of shades of gray.” For weeks, the mystery has been how Mr. Rusesabagina, a Belgian citizen and American permanent resident, was lured to Rwanda from his home in Texas. In an interview, Rwanda’s spy chief gleefully described how Mr. Rusesabagina had fallen for an elaborate ruse, involving a private jet from Dubai, that he called “flawless.” Human Rights Watch called it illegal, a “forced disappearance.” Mr. Rusesabagina, speaking in jail, said he believed he had been flying to Burundi. His family insists that he cannot speak freely. “With guns around him, he’s saying that in the belly of the beast,” said his son, Trésor Rusesabagina, 28, speaking from the United States. “And the beast can bite at any time.” A Five-Star Sanctuary The Hotel des Mille Collines, in the heart of Kigali, has been overtaken by newer, fancier hotels. But in 1994, it was a five-star sanctuary in a land of bloodshed. As Hutu militiamen rampaged through the streets in a convulsive slaughter, Mr. Rusesabagina, a Hutu, employed his wiles and the resources of his Belgian-owned hotel — beer, cash, and charm — to fend off the killers. He bribed army generals with dollars and cigars. He battled to protect his wife, Tatiana, a Tutsi. Outside the gate, Rwandans were hacked to death, burned alive or shot. Inside, miraculously, all 1,268 hotel residents survived. “An island of fear in a sea of fire,” Mr. Rusesabagina once called it. After the genocide, Mr. Rusesabagina went back to work. But the country was chaotic and tense. Two million Rwandan refugees had poured into neighboring countries. A new, Tutsi-led government, headed by the rebel leader, Mr. Kagame, was in charge. Many Hutus lived under a pall of suspicion that they bore collective responsibility for atrocities carried out by Hutu militiamen. Revenge killings were common. One day in late 1994, a soldier burst into Mr. Rusesabagina’s home and tried to shoot him. He managed to flee, but it “left him anxious,” recalled his son, Roger, 41, speaking from Billerica, Mass. Two years later, Mr. Rusesabagina received warnings that his life was in danger and his passport might be confiscated. The following day, the family bolted for Uganda, and soon after, moved to Belgium, Rwanda’s former colonial power. Mr. Rusesabagina applied for political asylum, drove a taxi, and bought a house in the Brussels suburbs. In 1998, his story featured in an acclaimed account of the genocide, “We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families,” by the American writer Philip Gourevitch. Otherwise, he wallowed in obscurity. Sometimes, his children recalled, he regaled taxi passengers with his past life in Rwanda. The Kigali Premiere Terry George, the Irish film director, first met Mr. Rusesabagina in Brussels in 2002, a passenger in his Mercedes taxi. A year later they traveled together for a research trip to Rwanda. At Kigali airport, they were greeted by a crowd of cheering genocide survivors, Mr. George recalled, and at the Mille Collines hotel, teary-eyed staff gushed about their former boss. “A hero’s welcome,” Mr. George said. Mr. Rusesabagina’s apprehensions about his safety had vanished, and he bought a plot to build a house. “I thought that things had changed,” he said from his cell this past week. Mr. George’s “Hotel Rwanda,” released in 2004, was lauded by critics and Hollywood royalty. At the Los Angeles premiere, Angelina Jolie, Harrison Ford and Matt Damon posed with Mr. Rusesabagina on the red carpet. Amnesty International promoted the film and it won three Academy Award nominations, including best actor for Don Cheadle, who played Mr. Rusesabagina. “We should be in awe of people like Paul,” Ms. Jolie said. In April 2005, for the Rwandan premiere, Mr. George flew from the United States to Brussels to rendezvous with Mr. Rusesabagina and his wife for the flight to Kigali. But only she was at the gate. Mr. Rusesabagina declined to board at the last minute. “He said he didn’t feel safe,” said Mr. George. “He said he had been warned not to come to Kigali.” In Rwanda, though, Mr. Kagame seemed to appreciate the film. He sat between his wife, Jeannette, and Mr. George for a screening in the InterContinental Hotel ballroom. When the audience cheered during a scene that showed Mr. Kagame’s face, the president chuckled. A year later, in May 2006, Mr. Kagame invited Mr. Cheadle and his family to the presidential palace in Kigali. While the adults shared a traditional drink of fermented milk, their children played together. About the film, Mr. Kagame “only said that he was grateful for the attention it brought to his country,” Mr. Cheadle recalled. But as Mr. Rusesabagina’s profile soared in America, Mr. Kagame’s camp bristled. After President George W. Bush awarded Mr. Rusesabagina the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States’ highest civilian award, in November 2005, the pro-government New Times published a series of articles attacking the hotelier. “A man who sold the soul of the Rwandan Genocide to amass medals” read one article. Months later, Mr. Kagame delivered his own broadside. Rwanda had no need for “manufactured” heroes “made in Europe or America,” he said. “An Ordinary Man,” Celebrated and Derided After “Hotel Rwanda,” Mr. Rusesabagina sold his taxi, signed up with a speaking agency, and traveled the world warning of genocide. Admiring articles likened him to Oskar Schindler, the German businessman who saved 1,100 Jews from the Nazis. He traveled to Africa with a congressional delegation and established a nonprofit, the Hotel Rwanda Rusesabagina Foundation, that accrued $241,242 from 2005 to 2007, according to tax filings. In 2006, he stood beside George Clooney and the Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel at a rally in Washington to warn of a new genocide in Darfur, in western Sudan. “It is another Rwanda,” Mr. Rusesabagina said. At home, the conflict with Mr. Kagame boiled over. Mr. Rusesabagina published a memoir, “An Ordinary Man,” that contained sharp criticisms of Mr. Kagame’s Rwanda — “A nation governed by and for the benefit of a small group of elite Tutsis,” he wrote. The few Hutus in power were “known locally as Hutus de service, or ‘Hutus for hire.’” In June 2007, Mr. Rusesabagina reported Mr. Kagame to an international tribunal on war crimes in Rwanda, for atrocities he said had been committed by Mr. Kagame’s troops during the genocide. A battle of narratives erupted. Over six months, the New Times published 21 articles with headlines like “Rusesabagina’s Megalomania Has No Limit.” Survivors from the Mille Collines came forward to accuse Mr. Rusesabagina of exaggerating his role, and even profiting from the genocide. A government official published a book that purported to tell Hotel Rwanda’s “real story.” Mr. Rusesabagina had some influential backers. In early 2006 Alison Des Forges, a noted scholar on the genocide, conducted a review of “An Ordinary Man” for his publisher, Penguin. Mr. Rusesabagina’s account was “true to what I have witnessed and experienced in this complicated society,” Ms. Des Forges wrote in a confidential letter seen by The Times. The Rwandan government intensified its campaign. In 2007, at a forum in Chicago, Rwanda’s ambassador to the United States accused Mr. Rusesabagina of financing rebel groups in eastern Congo. In Brussels, Mr. Rusesabagina began to feel unsafe. Intruders broke into his home twice, his children said, rifling drawers and stealing documents. When a car drove him off the road, he took it as an assassination attempt, they said. In 2009, Mr. Rusesabagina and his wife moved to a gated community in San Antonio, Texas, near the home of an ally — Bob Krueger, a former United States Senator and ambassador to Burundi, whom he had befriended. Even then, Mr. Kagame continued to court the stars of “Hotel Rwanda.” In June 2010, he sent his helicopter to bring Mr. Cheadle to northern Rwanda for a gorilla-naming ceremony, part of a lauded conservation effort. At a dinner afterward with the president, Mr. Cheadle recalled, there was no mention of Mr. Rusesabagina. The Long Arm of Kagame The death of Patrick Karegeya, a former Rwandan spy chief and critic of Mr. Kagame found strangled in a South African hotel room on Jan. 1, 2014, signaled yet again how far the president was prepared to go to quash dissent. In at least six countries, Rwandan exiles have been harassed, assaulted or killed, as part of an apparent covert campaign targeting Mr. Kagame’s most nettlesome detractors. Some were accused of having participated in the genocide. Others, like Mr. Karegeya, had been confidantes and even friends of Mr. Kagame. In Belgium, a fugitive politician was found floating in a canal. In Kenya, a former minister was shot dead in his car. In Britain, police warned two dissidents they faced an “imminent threat” from Rwanda’s government. In South Africa, a former army chief was shot in the stomach but survived. Western officials often looked the other way. “They are immensely special because of what happened in the past,” Andrew Mitchell, a former British development minister, said in 2015. “It engenders cutting them more slack.” Inside Rwanda, critics were also vanishing or dying mysteriously. In 2014 Kizito Mihigo, a popular gospel singer, was accused of treason over a song that drew attention to the death of all Rwandans, including moderate Hutus, since 1994 — challenging an official narrative of a “Tutsi genocide.” In February Mr. Mihigo, 38, was found dead in police custody. Mr. Kagame’s reputation was further tarnished by a 2010 report from the United Nations human rights body that accused Rwandan soldiers and allied militias of widespread rape, killings of tens of thousands of civilians, and recruitment of child soldiers in eastern Congo. A second United Nations report in 2012 made similar charges and earned Mr. Kagame an unusually public rebuke from President Obama. In 2010, a Rwandan prosecutor repeated the claim that Mr. Rusesabagina had wired funds to Congo-based rebels. The F.B.I. and Belgian authorities questioned him but took no action, his family said. In the United States, Mr. Cheadle met Mr. Kagame at a dinner party hosted by a mutual acquaintance. The friend, whom Mr. Cheadle declined to identify, later pitched the actor on a second Hotel Rwanda film, this time casting Mr. Rusesabagina in an unfavorable light. Mr. Cheadle was incredulous. “I said, ‘You want me to play the same character in a movie I was nominated for an Oscar for, to say that movie was horseshit, and now I’m doing the real movie? I’m probably not going to do that.’” In January 2018, months after Mr. Kagame had been re-elected with 99 percent of the vote, Mr. Rusesabagina tried to enlist a second American president to his cause. “I request your support in liberating Rwandan people,” he wrote President Trump. Since 1994, he said, “nothing has changed” in Rwanda. Bringing Change “By Any Means Possible” In June and July 2018, gunmen carried out a spate of attacks on remote villages in the Nyungwe forest, inside Rwanda’s southern border with Burundi. The deadliest hit Nyabimata, a hamlet of steep slopes and banana trees, on the night of June 19. Three people were killed, including Fidel Munyaneza, a primary schoolteacher. His wife, Josephine, said he had been shot in the back. The Rwandan authorities blamed the attack on the National Liberation Forces — the armed wing of a Rwandan opposition coalition that, at the time, was led by Paul Rusesabagina. Months later, Mr. Rusesabaginadelivered the video address that spoke of change “by any means possible,” which Rwanda’s government calls proof of his guilt. From jail, he said he did not remember making such a video. A Mysterious Flight to Kigali When he boarded a flight from Chicago to Dubai on Aug. 26, Mr. Rusesabagina provided his family with scant details. “Meetings,” he said. The pandemic had separated him from his wife, stranded in Brussels since February. He hadn’t been able to visit a newborn grandchild near Boston. But this trip was apparently worth it. Mr. Rusesabagina spent just six hours in Dubai. At the city’s second, smaller airport he boarded a private jet that he believed was headed to Bujumbura, Burundi. In fact, the plane was operated by GainJet, a Greece-based charter company frequently used by Mr. Kagame. It landed just before dawn on Aug. 28 in Kigali, where Mr. Rusesabagina was promptly arrested. “He delivered himself here,” said Rwanda’s spy chief, Brig. Gen. Joseph Nzabamwita, with a smile. “Quite a wonderful operation.” If that operation was straight out of the Kagame playbook — dissidents say a private jet flew another opposition leader from the Comoro Islands to Rwanda last year — the nature of the bait used to entrap Rwanda’s latest victim was unclear. Mr. Rusesabagina said he had been invited to Burundi by a pastor, Constantin Niyomwungere, who invited him to speak at his churches. The pastor could not be reached for comment. Rwandan officials say Mr. Rusesabagina’s true purpose was to coordinate with armed groups based in Burundi and Congo. Mr. Rusesabagina seemed determined in the jailhouse interview to maintain his customary unruffled demeanor. But he could be evasive and contradictory. He spent the first three days of captivity at an unknown location, blindfolded and bound, where he was interrogated “not much,” he said. Human Rights Watch says his arrest violates international law, even if he was duped into voluntarily boarding the flight from Dubai. General Nzabamwita dismissed any suggestion of illegality because, he said, the United States and Belgium had been cooperating with his investigation all along. In fact, he added, the head of Belgian intelligence and the C.I.A. station chief in Kigali had personally congratulated him on the arrest. “They were only surprised how we could conduct such an operation, and very successfully,” he said. American and Belgian officials denied the general’s assertion. In an email, a spokesman for Belgium’s SGRS intelligence service said its head, Claude Van de Voorde, had “NEVER congratulated the Rwandan authorities” on the arrest. Embracing — and Fearing — the Truth In “Hotel Rwanda” Mr. Rusesabagina is depicted as a wheeler-dealer who used cigars and flattery to talk his way out of the deadliest trouble. Now, confined to a jail cell five miles away, those are not options. Supporters, both in Hollywood and the Rwandan opposition, argue that he cannot receive a fair trial. “They will do everything to keep him in jail,” said Faustin Twagiramungu, a former prime minister of Rwanda and political ally of Mr. Rusesabagina. Mr. Rusesabagina, for his part, insisted that his group was “not a terrorist organization,” even if its components include an armed group. Its objective, he said, was to highlight the plight of “millions” of Rwandan refugees and exiles, like him, who remain trapped outside the country, more than a quarter century after the genocide. “We wanted to wake up the international community, foreign countries and Rwanda itself,” he said. “To remind them that we also exist.” Abdi Latif Dahir reported from Kigali and Nairobi, Declan Walsh from Cairo, Matina Stevis-Gridneff from Brussels and Athens, and Ruth Maclean from Dakar, Senegal. Julian Barnes contributed reporting from Washington. The article was written by Mr. Walsh. © 2020 The New York Times Company.

Deng Machol, July 1, 2022 FILE - South Sudan's president Salva Kiir, left, and vice-president Riek Machar, right, shake hands after meetings to discuss outstanding issues to the peace deal on Oct. 20, 2019. Machar is urging regional mediators in March 2022 to intervene to protect the country's fragile peace deal, warning of a return to war amid alleged attacks by government troops on his forces.(AP Photo/Sam Mednick, File) JUBA, South Sudan (AP) — The head of the United Nations mission in South Sudan urged the East African country’s transitional government Thursday to set a date for elections as time passes. Nicholas Haysom told journalists in the capital, Juba that with barely eight months remaining in the transitional period agreed by political parties, “I am urging south Sudanese leaders to do everything necessary to move the country out of transition and conduct free, fair, creditable and peaceful elections.” A 2018 peace deal that binds President Salva Kiir and his deputy Riek Machar in a unity government encourages authorities to hold elections before February 2023. The international community has long hoped a vote would usher in a democratically elected government in the world’s youngest country. A timetable for the polls must be availed in advance for the international community to support the process well, Haysom said, adding that without a date “nobody will really commit to supporting the elections and the South Sudanese will not get into the frame of mind which is necessary” for elections. The government has yet to reconstitute an electoral commission and implement key judicial reforms — and Kiir and Machar are known to have different opinions on the matter. Kiir, South Sudan’s president since independence from Sudan in 2011, says general elections will take place as planned in 2023 despite delays in implementing the roadmap. Machar insists elections cannot be free and fair unless key provisions in the 2018 deal are fully implemented. Another opposition figure, Lam Akol, has voiced skepticism about the chances of a fair vote in a country plagued by sporadic violence. But Haysom said Thursday that elections can still happen if authorities create the right circumstances. “It’s not only technical arrangements and logistical planning that’s necessary for elections to take place. What is also required is a free and open political environment,” he said. There were high hopes for peace and stability once South Sudan gained its long-fought independence from Sudan. But it slid into ethnic violence in December 2013 when forces loyal to Kiir, a Dinka, started battling those loyal to Machar, a Nuer. Numerous attempts at a durable peace failed. The civil war killed nearly 400,000 people and displaced millions. Intense international pressure followed the 2018 deal, and in February 2020 a coalition government led by Kiir, with Machar as his deputy, was formed. All contents © copyright 2022 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Seizing Darfur Region, Paramilitary Forces Are Accused of Atrocities The New York Times November 16. 2023 Seven months into Sudan’s civil war, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and its allies are ransacking and capturing the Darfur region. An aid worker said, “People are dying like insects.” A Sudanese woman mourning a relative she said was killed by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. She had fled from El Geneina in the Darfur region in July, across the border into Chad.Credit...Zohra Bensemra/Reuters By Declan Walsh and Abdi Latif Dahir Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya Bodies littered the road out of El Geneina, a town in western Sudan, as Dr. Rodwan Mustafa and his family sped down a bumpy road that led to the border with Chad and, they hoped, safety. A day earlier, rampaging Arab militiamen had grabbed Dr. Mustafa by the neck, accusing him of giving medical care to enemy fighters. That was his signal to run. Racing toward the border with his family in a car, he saw chickens clucking over the bloodied corpses of those who hadn’t fled in time. A camp for displaced people stood empty, burned to the ground. He spotted a dismembered hand on the roadside. “The smell of death was everywhere,” said Dr. Mustafa, who made it to a refugee camp in Chad and spoke by phone from there. Seven months into Sudan’s disastrous civil war, new horrors have accompanied the latest fighting in Darfur, a sprawling region in the west of the country where a powerful paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces, has scored a succession of sweeping victories over Sudan’s regular military in recent weeks. After capturing three of Darfur’s five state capitals, including El Geneina on Nov. 4, the paramilitary group is on the verge of seizing the entire region, according to residents, analysts and United Nations officials interviewed in recent days. Although that tilts the war in favor of the paramilitary group’s commander, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, neither side looks capable of outright victory, according to African and western officials — a stalemate that has deepened civilian suffering. The R.S.F.’s recent victories have also come at the cost of ethnic violence that recalls the genocidal massacres that brought global attention to Darfur just over two decades ago. Earlier this month, more than 800 people were killed as R.S.F. and allied Arab fighters overran the army garrison in El Geneina, according to the United Nations refugee agency. Homes were razed and United Nations supplies looted, the agency said. Routed Sudanese soldiers fled across the border into Chad, carrying stores of ammunition. Destruction in a market area in El Fasher, capital of Sudan’s North Darfur State, in September.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Aid workers and witnesses also reported sexual violence, torture and killings of members of the Masalit, an ethnic African group with a long history of conflict with ethnic Arabs. “They came to massacre us,” said Ahmed Sharif, a schoolteacher who fled El Geneina on Nov. 5 and walked 13 hours to reach Chad. Violence in Sudan Fighting between two military factions has thrown Sudan into chaos, with plans for a transition to a civilian-led democracy now in shambles. Filippo Grandi, the head of the United Nations refugee agency, said: “Twenty years ago, the world was shocked by the terrible atrocities in Darfur. We fear a similar dynamic might be developing.” The dire situation is not yet a full repeat of the early 2000s, when the scorched-earth tactics of Arab militiamen caused the International Criminal Court to file charges of genocide against Sudanese leaders, including the former president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was deposed in 2019. This time, diplomats and analysts say, the ethnic violence is more a byproduct of the national battle between forces loyal to the army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and General Hamdan, rather than a coordinated campaign of slaughter. The R.S.F. wants to present itself as a responsible group that could one day govern Sudan. In an emailed response to questions, it blamed Sudan’s army for the recent deaths in El Geneina, accusing it of shelling civilian neighborhoods. A formal investigation of possible abuses is underway, the group said. But promises of transparency from a paramilitary group that grew out of the feared militias known as the Janjaweed that terrorized Darfur in the 2000s are viewed with wide skepticism. In private, R.S.F. officials conceded that undisciplined fighters have carried out abuses, diplomats say. And in July, the International Criminal Court opened a new investigation into possible war crimes in Darfur. A video posted on social media by the Rapid Support Forces in July purporting to show Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, the forces’ commander, addressing fighters at an undisclosed location.Credit...via Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Still, the dynamic could quickly change if other armed groups in Darfur, currently sitting on the fence, decide to join the fray. After months of grinding battle in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, where fighting first erupted in April, the Rapid Support Forces have turned their focus back to Darfur, the region where most of the group’s fighters are originally from. It captured in quick succession Nyala, Sudan’s second-largest city, Zalingei in Central Darfur and El Geneina. Now, battle rages in El Fasher, the last stronghold of the army in Darfur. If that falls, experts say, most of Sudan west of the Nile will be in R.S.F. hands. “El Fasher is the last big domino yet to fall,” said Alan Boswell, an analyst at the International Crisis Group. The battle’s outcome depends in part on decisions taken by Minni Minnawi, the regional governor of Darfur, whose armed forces are concentrated around El Fasher. So far, they have avoided taking sides in the war. And although Mr. Minnawi is a longtime R.S.F. rival, many doubt that his fighters have the strength to confront the paramilitary group now. “Fighting looks like a bad proposition for them,” Mr. Boswell said. A military convoy accompanying the regional governor of Darfur, Minni Minawi, in August on the way to Port Sudan, which is held by the Sudanese military and is now the center of government.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images The changes highlight how much ground Sudan’s military, long seen as the backbone of the state, has lost in this war. Unable to dislodge the R.S.F. from Khartoum, the military has been forced to shift most government functions to Port Sudan, on the Red Sea, in the country’s far east. Aid groups and U.N. missions are also working from there. International efforts to broker a cease-fire, led by the United States and Saudi Arabia, have failed to find compromise. The latest talks last week in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, produced little. And the humanitarian cost is soaring. So far, at least 10,400 people have died, mostly in Khartoum and Darfur, according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, although Sudanese health workers say the real toll is most likely much higher. Nearly five million people — about one-tenth of Sudan’s population — have been internally displaced, and an additional 1.2 million have fled into neighboring countries, mostly Chad, South Sudan and Egypt. Half of Sudan’s 46 million people need aid to survive, the United Nations says. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan arriving with officials and guards at the military airport in Port Sudan in August.Credit...Ibrahim Mohammed Ishak/Reuters A handful of aid groups have trickled back into West Darfur in recent months after reaching agreements with the R.S.F. and Arab militias. Their employees describe massacres of civilians, dozens of reported rapes, orphaned children and refugee-filled schools. Will Carter, the Sudan director of the Norwegian Refugee Council, blamed the world for turning its back on Sudan. “The sheer number of deaths, the scale of the devastation in Darfur and the lack of attention show how the international system is failing right in front of our eyes,” he said. Ali Salam, an aid coordinator with the Sudanese American Physicians Association, said he had seen “unbelievable” things during a recent visit to refugee camps in Chad near the Sudanese border. One woman arrived at a camp with a dead child strapped to her back, unaware that the child had died along the way, he said. “People are dying like insects in Darfur,” he said. As events in the Middle East preoccupy the United States, for years a major influence in Sudan, there is even less scrutiny of foreign powers accused of fueling Sudan’s war, like the United Arab Emirates. An investigation showed the Emiratis are smuggling arms to General Hamdan from a base in Chad, or Egypt, which backs Sudan’s military. Two decades ago, the cause of peace in Sudan was embraced by Western celebrities and activists who held marches in Washington under the “Save Darfur” banner. This time, many in Sudan feel that the world has turned its back on them. “How many more lives will it take for the world to step in, for people to care?” said Omnia Mustafa, a 21-year-old Sudanese woman (not related to Dr. Mustafa) who appealed on TikTok this week for outsiders to take notice of her country’s plight. “I’m sick and tired of our suffering falling into deaf ears,” she said. “We are also people, like everyone else.” A camp for the internally displaced in al-Suwar, Sudan, in June.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty [A correction was made on Nov. 16, 2023) Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated the time period in which more than 800 people were killed as Rapid Support Forces and allied Arab fighters overran the army garrison in El Geneina. The killing began earlier this month, on Nov. 2, and did not just occur last week. When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more] Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent for The Times. He was previously based in Egypt, covering the Middle East, and in Pakistan. He previously worked at The Guardian and is the author of “The Nine Lives of Pakistan.” More about Declan Walsh Abdi Latif Dahir is the East Africa correspondent. He joined The Times in 2019 after covering East Africa for Quartz for three years. He lives in Nairobi, Kenya. More about Abdi Latif Dahir A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 16, 2023, Section A, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Darfur Teeters, With Paramilitaries Accused of Atrocities Copyright 2023 The New York Times Company

By The New York Times Copyright 2023 The New York Times Company

A War on the Nile Pushes Sudan Toward the Abyss The New York Times June 5, 2024 By Declan Walsh Photographs by Ivor Prickett Declan Walsh and Ivor Prickett spent three weeks traveling in Sudan, which has been closed to most foreign journalists since the war began. The gold market is a graveyard of rubble and dog-eaten corpses. The state TV station became a torture chamber. The national film archive was blown open in battle, its treasures now yellowing in the sun. Artillery shells soar over the Nile, smashing into hospitals and houses. Residents bury their dead outside their front doors. Others march in formation, joining civilian militias. In a hushed famine ward, starving babies fight for life. Every few days, one of them dies. Khartoum, the capital of Sudan and one of the largest cities in Africa, has been reduced to a charred battleground. A feud between two generals fighting for power has dragged the country into civil war and turned the city into ground zero for one of the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophes. As many as 150,000 people have died since the conflict erupted last year, by American estimates. Another nine million have been forced from their homes, making Sudan home to the largest displacement crisis on earth, the United Nations says. A famine looms that officials warn could kill hundreds of thousands of children in the coming months and, if unchecked, rival the great Ethiopian famine of the 1980s. Fueling the chaos, Sudan has become a playground for foreign players like the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Russia and its Wagner mercenaries, and even a few Ukrainian special forces. They are all part of a volatile stew of outside interests pouring weapons or fighters into the conflict and hoping to grab the spoils of war — Sudan’s gold, for instance, or its perch on the Red Sea. Members of a Sudanese special forces unit posing for a photo during a military demonstration. Mahmoud Ismail, 39, a soldier with the Sudanese military, having his bandage changed by a doctor at the Bawarith military hospital in Port Sudan. Skeletal remains, apparently of a Rapid Support Forces fighter, on a street in central Omdurman. The city was recaptured by the Sudanese military during fierce fighting in February. The greatest tragedy is that none of it was necessary, said Samawal Ahmed, as he picked his way through the remnants of a famous market, past looted jewelry stores and a mangled tank. A year ago, in the first weeks of the war, a rocket smashed into his apartment, and the medical lab where he worked closed down for good. Now he was back, to salvage what he could. “I lost everything,” he said, holding a batch of documents pulled from the wreckage of his home: his children’s school certificates, his professional qualifications, and a passport. Across the street, the withered remains of three fighters, reduced to bones, were splayed among the debris. “It makes my stomach churn,” Mr. Ahmed said. “All this could have been avoided.” The war erupted without warning in April 2023, when a standoff between Sudan’s military and a powerful paramilitary group it helped create — the Rapid Support Forces — burst into gunfire on the streets of Khartoum. Few Sudanese expected it would last long. Since independence in 1956, their country has experienced more coups than any other in Africa, most short-lived and bloodless. The rivals this time — the national army and the paramilitary force that once did its bidding — had seized power together in 2021, but fell out over how to merge their armies. Once a Proud Capital, Now a Battle Zone The map locates the tri-city area of greater Khartoum in Sudan, which includes Khartoum to the south, Bahri, or Khartoum North to the north, and the city of Omdurman to the west. Khartoum and Bahri are mostly controlled by the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., and the Sudan military controls the northern and central parts of Omdurman, while large areas of west and south Omdurman are still held by the R.S.F. Almost immediately, the fighting ripped across Khartoum and far beyond, in pulsing waves that quickly consumed Africa’s third-largest country. Sudanese have been stunned by the destruction, but neither side looks capable of victory, and the war is metastasizing into a devastating free-for-all. Another genocide now threatens Darfur, the region that became synonymous with war crimes two decades ago. Fields have become battlegrounds in the country’s breadbasket. The health system is crumbling. And a plethora of armed groups, including hard-line Islamists, foreign mercenaries and even former pro-democracy protesters, has piled into the fight. With American-led peace talks stalled, the Sudanese state is collapsing and threatening to drag down a fragile region with it. Experts say it is a matter of time before one of Sudan’s many neighbors, like Chad, Eritrea or South Sudan, gets sucked in. Though often overshadowed by the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the conflict in Sudan has global ramifications. Iran, already allied with the Houthis in Yemen, is now backing military forces on both sides of the Red Sea. Europeans fear a wave of Sudanese migrants heading for their shores. A recent U.S. intelligence assessment warned that a lawless Sudan could become a haven for “terrorist and criminal networks.” Khartoum’s famous gold and silver market is looted and in ruins. UNICEF pitches tents for clinic for some of the nine million internally displaced persons in Sudan. Wrecked armored personnel carriers line the streets As we approached the capital, artillery boomed, a warplane swept overhead and, across the Nile, an oily plume of smoke rose from Sudan’s largest refinery — the latest flashpoint in a sprawling urban battle. With the city in tumult, we slept in an abandoned house, where a neighbor told of how a bomb killed his sister in their kitchen. It was just one corner of a country three times larger than France. Yet it was possible to see, up close, the immense damage to a capital once considered a jewel on the Nile — and how, if unchecked, it could still get much worse. The River Gunfire and mortars splashed into the waters around Col. Osman Taha, a badly wounded officer in the Sudanese military, as he crossed the Nile on a moonless night last November. Around him, he recalled, other wounded soldiers huddled in the boat, hoping to avoid being hit again. Several died. Colonel Taha made it to the far bank, and five days later his right leg was amputated. Even then, there was no respite. As he recovered in a military hospital overlooking the Nile, he said, shells slammed into its walls, fired by the Rapid Support Forces across the river. Patients moved their beds to avoid being hit as artillery fell. “It was hell." Col. Osman Taha, a wounded officer in the Sudanese military. Violence in Sudan Fighting between two military factions has thrown Sudan into chaos, with plans for a transition to a civilian-led democracy now in shambles. What to Know: Two generals — one backed by Sudan’s army, the other by a powerful paramilitary group — have been vying for power in the African country in a conflict that began in 2023. Millions of Sudanese people have fled, but many are stuck in war zones struggling to survive. Children Among Dozens Killed: Videos show paramilitaries opening fire on the village in what had been Sudan’s breadbasket region, causing the latest mass civilian casualties in a brutal war. Toward the Abyss: A year of fighting has turned Sudan’s once proud capital, Khartoum, into a charred battleground. Now a famine threatens one of Africa’s biggest countries. Dreading the Worst: Fears of renewed ethnic slaughter in the Sudanese region of Darfur, where genocidal violence killed as many as 300,000 people two decades ago, have soared amid a looming assault on the embattled city of El Fasher. The Nile has long defined Khartoum. Its tributaries merge in the city center before pushing north through the desert into Egypt. Now, the great river divides Khartoum militarily as well, yet another front line in a splintered capital. Snipers nestle in the riverbank beneath a giant bridge, blown up in fighting, that slumps into the river. Drones swoop over the water, hunting for targets. And an island in the center of the Nile, where people once picnicked and swam, has become a kind of open-air prison controlled by the R.S.F., residents say. “Watch your step,” said Dr. Manahil Mohamed as she led us up a sandbag-lined staircase to the fourth floor of the Aliaa Specialist Hospital, overlooking the Nile, where a line of blown-out windows offered a stark panorama. Medics and soldiers outside the Aliaa Specialist Hospital, which was repeatedly bombed by Rapid Support Forces. Doctors and nurses working at the hospital during a blackout. Downtown Khartoum, the scene of heavy fighting since the war started, was visible across the Nile from the hospital. On the deserted street below, burned-out vehicles clustered around the Parliament building. In the distance stood the skeletal skyline of downtown Khartoum: government ministries, luxury hotels and mirrored high-rises that poked over the city’s poverty, many built during Sudan’s oil boom of the 1990s, now pocked by shelling or gutted by fire. Among them stood the old Republican Palace where followers of the Mahdi, a cleric, toppled and beheaded the country’s British governor-general, Charles Gordon, in 1885. It, too, has gone up in smoke. In many ways, the destruction in Khartoum is a bitter historical reckoning. For over half a century, Sudan’s military waged ugly wars in the nation’s distant peripheries, quelling rebellions by deploying ruthless militias. Khartoum was left untouched, its residents insulated from the consequences of wars fought in their name. Now, the army’s most powerful creation — the Rapid Support Forces, a successor to the infamous Janjaweed militias that terrorized Darfur in the 2000s — has turned against the military and brought its trademark havoc to the capital. Half of Khartoum state’s nine million residents have fled, the United Nations estimates. Its international airport is closed, bullet-pocked jets abandoned on the runway. Nearly all of the city’s 1,060 bank branches have been robbed, officials say, and many thousands of cars stolen — some later located as far away as Niger, 1,500 miles west — in a campaign of street-by-street looting, most but not all, by the Rapid Support Forces. “A city of this size, this wealth, and nothing remains?” Mohamed Eldaw, a banker, said. “It must be the biggest episode of looting in history.” At the Aliaa hospital, a triple thud of outgoing artillery shattered the calm. Warning of snipers, Dr. Mohamed urged us back inside. For months, shells rained on the hospital, which mostly treated soldiers, often punching through its walls, she said. With no electricity, surgeons performed operations by the light of mobile phones. Relief came in February when the military, armed with powerful new Iranian drones, recaptured this part of the city. (By contrast, the R.S.F. uses drones supplied by the United Arab Emirates). The military’s advance allowed hundreds of wounded troops to be evacuated by air to Port Sudan, where they lie in the crowded wards of a military hospital. One man had extensive facial injuries from a drone strike. Amputations were common. Sudanese army soldiers recuperating in a ward of the Bawarith military hospital. Cpl. Issa Musa, 37, who was seriously injured in a drone strike in January, at the hospital. Sgt. Sayeed Ali Hassan’s son praying while visiting him at the hospital. His father was wounded by mortar fire in 2023. The evacuees included Colonel Taha, who sat up in his bed to show a series of videos that he took during his last battle. Jubilant soldiers can be seen whooping and hugging, thinking they have won. Bleeding R.S.F. fighters lie in the dust, and are kicked or taunted by the soldiers. The camera flips to show Colonel Taha himself, sweating heavily, his eyes glazed from battle. But the soldiers had missed one R.S.F. fighter, a sniper hidden in a residential block, and he shot Colonel Taha in the leg. Later that night, he said, medics moved him to an ammunition factory beside the Nile, where they embarked on their perilous crossing. He was pessimistic the war would end anytime soon. “Guns can’t solve this problem,” he said. “We need to talk peace.” The Famine Ward To Amna Amin, war means hunger. After Rapid Support Forces fighters swept into her part of Omdurman, one of the three cities that make up greater Khartoum, Ms. Amin, 36, had no way to feed her five children. Her husband, a gold miner in the distant north, had vanished. She lost her job as a cleaner. Neighbors shared what they could, but it wasn’t enough. And soon she had two more mouths to feed: Iman and Ayman, twins born in September. Within months, the twins started losing weight and suffering diarrhea, classic signs of malnutrition. Panicking, Ms. Amin bundled her children in her arms and made a desperate dash across the front line, traveling by donkey cart and minibus to reach Al Buluk children’s hospital, the last place they might be saved. The United Nations has yet to officially declare a famine in Sudan, but few experts doubt that one is already underway in parts of Darfur and, shockingly, Khartoum, one of the largest capitals in Africa. More than 220,000 children could die in the coming months alone, the U.N. says. And both sides use hunger as a weapon of war, aid officials say. The army withholds visas, travel permits and permission to cross the front lines. Rapid Support Force fighters have looted aid trucks and warehouses and raised their own obstacles. “One of the most horrific situations on Earth is on a trajectory to get far, far worse,” said Tom Perriello, the United States envoy for Sudan. Children in a famine recovery ward. Pediatric out-patient unit at one of few functioning hospitals left in Khartoum. The hospitals still functioning are strained to the point of collapse. Every day hundreds of new patients arrive at Al Nau hospital, near the frontline in Omdurman. Many sleep two to a bed. Patients spoke of pinballing from one neighborhood to another as the front line shifts, running a gauntlet of checkpoints defended by fighters who demand money, steal phones and sometimes open fire. Huda Adil, 30, was paralyzed from the waist down after R.S.F. fighters shot up the bus she was traveling in. (Three passengers died, she said). Amouna Elhadi sat over her son, Hassan, a 14-year-old shot in the stomach by the mustanfareen, as new youth groups fighting alongside Sudan’s military have become known. “All his stomach fell out.” Amouna Elhadi, mother of Hassan, 14. Mujahid Abdulaziz, however, was smiling. For 10 weeks, he had been trying to get a bullet removed from his leg. An R.S.F. fighter shot him at a checkpoint after a drone strike on a nearby fuel station killed several other fighters. “The guy was angry,” Mr. Abdulaziz said. For Mr. Abdulaziz, a 20-year-old engineering student, it was just the start of a torturous search for help. One hospital patched up his wound, but couldn’t extract the bullet. A second hospital couldn’t, either. He crossed the Nile three times, circling the capital in buses that passed through deserts and around a mountain. Finally, after a journey of 100 miles that should have been 10, he reached Al Nau hospital, where doctors pulled out the bullet, at last. Not long ago, Mr. Abdulaziz believed he was part of an exciting future. He participated in the euphoric mass protests in 2019 that helped topple President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Sudan’s autocratic ruler of three decades, a moment of triumph for the country. Two years later, he returned to the streets, defiantly flinging stones at riot police officers following the military coup that set back hopes for civilian rule. Some protesters now run soup kitchens that provide much of the limited aid available in Khartoum. But Mr. Abdulaziz just felt defeated. Before the war, “we were just dreaming,” he said. “Those hopes are gone.” Clinging to Hope Mudassir Ibrahim, 50, lifted his shirt to show welts across his back — evidence, he said, of a week spent in R.S.F. detention inside the headquarters of Sudan’s national radio and television station. His captors beat him with iron rods and electrical cables, he said: “It felt like death a thousand times over.” At the television station in Omdurman, we saw evidence to back his claims. Ropes and other restraints hung from barred rooms in the finance department. Piles of dry excrement were scattered on the floor. Filthy walls were scrawled with names, pleas and snatches of poetry. “The treachery of your tears is no use to fight injustice,” read one. “Friends forever” read another, under a list of six names. The smoke is rising from territory controlled by the Rapid Support Forces in Khartoum, across the Nile. The Sudanese military trying to open a makeshift detention cell in Omdurman after driving the R.S.F. out of the area. Graffiti covered the wall of a room used by R.S.F. forces at the broadcasting headquarters. Most of the compound stood in ruins. Its main building had been incinerated by airstrikes, while a film archive dating back to the 1940s, one of the largest in Africa, had been blown open by gunfire. The R.S.F. had retreated across the river, soldiers said, but some left behind their own wartime wisdom. “As long as death is certain,” read a line scrawled on one wall, “don’t live like a coward.” (The R.S.F. did not respond to the allegations of torture and other abuses by its fighters). As the fighting raged, some Omdurman residents refused to leave. “We were born here, we grew up here, and we will die here,” said Edward Fahmy, 73, sitting in his courtyard of his modest home in the old city, where pictures of Jesus hung on every wall. Mr. Fahmy and his cousin, Janette Naeim, 50, stayed put even as bombs rained down. Ms. Naeim was hit by a stray bullet as she went to fetch water. When two relatives died, they buried them outside their front door, they said, showing a pair of freshly dug mounds. Both Orthodox Christians, they are testament to the enduring religious and ethnic diversity of a country whose image was often obscured by three decades of harsh Islamist rule. The war risks washing away that richness as well. Imago Dei. Marmina Coptic Orthodox Church At the Marmina Coptic Orthodox church, shafts of dusty light shone through holes in a rooftop fresco of Jesus, punctured in the fighting. The bishop fled after R.S.F. fighters smashed into his home, firing guns and shouting “Where are the dollars?” said Andrews Hanna, a local businessman. When Mr. Hanna turned up, an hour later, the floor was smeared with the blood of a priest who had shielded the bishop from rifle blows, he said. Then Mr. Hanna’s factory was raided by fighters who carted away 8,000 motorbikes and rickshaws, he said. Weeks later, his family fled. Families ate from a communal kitchen and fetched water from the Nile, he said, showing us around a mosque, a well-stocked pharmacy and apartments. His followers helped bury the dead, and at night they performed zikir, a devotional dance that is an expression of Sufi spirituality. “It soothed our souls,” he said. Sheikh Elamin and follower A soup kitchen still offered meals. Sheikh Elamin, a towering man in flowing green robes, said he paid for it all from his own pocket. Beyond running a Sufi Muslim order with branches in London, New York and Dubai, he was also a businessman who owned a gold mine and a meat export business, he said. Before the war, the sheikh was sometimes criticized for his lavish choices, like chartering a private jet to attend the World Cup in Qatar in 2022. But his charity now has brought praise. “In this time of war, he’s become the most popular figure in the country — period,” said Suliman Baldo, a veteran Sudan analyst. “People need something positive to hold onto.” Nearby, we passed a giant mural with the word “Freedom,” leftover from the protests of 2019 and pocked by gunfire. Down the street, men huddled over a pot of bubbling lentils as they prepared to return to their shattered homes — a cautious gesture of hope as the war dragged on. Returning residents wait for food. “We will have a beautiful future, God willing,” said Mahmoud Mustafa, a rickshaw driver clutching a plastic food bowl. He didn’t even flinch when another artillery barrage rang out, sending more shells across the Nile. The Militias Hundreds of black-clad young women, turning in perfect unison, marched through a schoolyard in Omdurman early one morning, the latest recruits in a rapidly expanding conflict. The war started as a dispute between two men — Sudan’s army chief, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces leader, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan. But since last fall, when a succession of R.S.F. victories set off widespread alarm, a proliferation of armed groups has joined the fight, mostly backing the military. There are rebels from Darfur, ethnic militias, Islamists once loyal to former President Bashir, and thousands of young people, women as well as men, recruited from the streets. Even idealistic young Sudanese who once risked their lives to protest against Mr. Bashir and, later, the military, have joined in. Young boys cheering on a Sudanese special forces unit on the edge of Omdurman. Cleaning up a textile shop in the Souk Omdurman district, which was badly damaged in fighting in February. Whether the militias will decide the war, or cause it to spin entirely out of control, is unclear. Sudan’s military tumbled into the war because it outsourced its fighting to a powerful group, the Rapid Support Forces, that ultimately turned against it. Now, critics say, the military is in danger of repeating that mistake by empowering more militias. Even some military leaders are worried. In March, a member of the military high command, Lt. Gen. Shams al-Din al-Kabbashi, warned that, unless the militias were kept in check, “the next danger will come from” them. Days later he was rebuked by another commander, Lt. Gen. Yasser al-Atta, who said the army “blessed” the popular militias. “Any mistakes can be corrected as we move forward,” he said. The Weapons Store Wooden crates lay scattered across the weapons depot we sifted through next to an abandoned R.S.F. base. Any identifying marks — serial numbers or other clues that showed who had supplied the weapons — had been carefully scraped off. The foreign powers fueling Sudan’s war seemed to be covering their tracks. Yet traces remain. American officials have grown increasingly critical of the United Arab Emirates, the war’s biggest foreign sponsor. It has extensive gold and agricultural interests in Sudan, and before the war signed a deal to build a $6 billion port on the Red Sea. Since last year, it has smuggled weapons to the R.S.F. through a base in Chad, in breach of a U.N. arms embargo, The Times reported. Egypt, by contrast, has backed Sudan’s military. But it is the army’s recent turn to Iran for drones and other weapons that has caused alarm in Washington, several Western officials said. Sudanese military personnel standing guard in the basement of a building used as an arms depot by the R.S.F. in Omdurman. Waiting for help in the malnutrition unit at Al Buluk Children’s Hospital in Omdurman. Countless homes were looted in areas controlled by the Rapid Support Forces. Russia seems to have helped both sides. Earlier in the war, Wagner mercenaries supplied the R.S.F. with antiaircraft missiles, U.N. investigators say. Russians later traveled to Khartoum, where they trained fighters to shoot down Sudanese military warplanes, said two senior Sudanese officials who provided the Russians’ names and details of their movements. Today, nearly two dozen Wagner operatives remain in the capital, mostly Libyan and Syrian recruits, flying drones and firing mortars for the R.S.F., the Sudanese said. The Russian presence even spurred Ukraine to deploy a small team of special forces to counter its nemesis abroad by helping the Sudanese military in Khartoum. But Russia’s posture may have changed since the death of Wagner’s founder, Yevgeny V. Prigozhin. Following a visit to Port Sudan by Russia’s Middle East envoy in April, a top Sudanese general said recently that Sudan was prepared to allow Russian naval access to its ports, a longstanding desire for Moscow, in exchange for arms and ammunition. The foreign meddling is frustrating American- and Saudi-led diplomacy to reach a cease-fire, though critics say even those efforts to save Sudan have been shamefully weak. The country, they warn, is barreling into a protracted conflict that could lead to anarchy or rival fiefs, like Somalia in the 1990s or Libya after 2011. The war could easily spill beyond Sudan’s borders. It is already causing tensions inside the security services of Chad, and has cut off vital oil revenues for South Sudan. Now it risks sucking in Ethiopia, Africa’s second-most populous country. Sudanese officials accuse Ethiopia of backing the R.S.F. Meanwhile, Eritrea, Ethiopia’s traditional enemy, has sided with Sudan’s military. And thousands of rebels from Ethiopia’s restive Tigray region are stationed at a camp in eastern Sudan, officials and aid groups said — part of a combustible mix that threatens to open a new front in the war. Some Sudanese in exile desperately want the outside world to intervene. But so far, they say, it’s only made things worse. “It’s sheer madness,” said Ibrahim Elbadawi, a former economy minister now in Cairo, calling for a U.N. peacekeeping force to save his country from collapse. “The people of Sudan demand it,” he said. “Enough is enough.” Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent for The Times based in Nairobi, Kenya. He previously reported from Cairo, covering the Middle East, and Islamabad, Pakistan. More about Declan Walsh Ivor Prickett is a photographer based in Istanbul. He covered the rise and fall of ISIS in Iraq and Syria while on assignment for The Times. More recently he has been working on stories related to the war in Ukraine. More about Ivor Prickett Copyright 2024 The New York Times Company https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/05/world/africa/sudan-khartoum-darfur-war.html?searchResultPosition=2

750,000 on Brink of Starvation in Sudan The New York Times June 27, 2024 A devastating civil war is pushing the country toward a full-blown famine, according to the international body that measures hunger. A 20-month-old, Bara’a Ahmed, being treated in the malnutrition unit at a hospital in Port Sudan in April. Conditions have worsened sharply since last year, a global body says.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times By Declan Walsh Reporting from Nairobi, Kenya At least 750,000 people are on the brink of starvation and death in Sudan, where a devastating civil war has left over half the country’s 48 million people in a situation of chronic hunger, the global authority on famine said on Thursday. At least 14 areas across the country are near famine, including some in the capital, Khartoum, according to the latest figures from the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification, a group of experts from U.N. bodies and major relief agencies that measures hunger and formally declares famine. The dire update appeared to confirm warnings from aid experts that Sudan is hurtling toward a humanitarian disaster on a scale not seen in decades. “This is possibly the crisis of a generation,” said Edouard Rodier, Europe director for the Norwegian Refugee Council, who was in western Sudan last week. “I’ve never seen anything like it.” In a report issued on Thursday, the group said that 25.6 million Sudanese, or over half the population, were in a food crisis. Of them, 8.5 million are acutely malnourished or scrambling to survive while 755,000 are in a “catastrophe” — essentially, famine conditions. When the group, known as the I.P.C., last issued estimates for Sudan in December, the number of people facing catastrophic levels of food insecurity was zero. The latest figures exceed even those of Gaza, where the group said on Tuesday that 495,000 people were in the same situation. The group has not formally declared a famine in Sudan, in part because reliable data is hard to obtain. Sudan’s health system is collapsing and aid workers cannot reach the worst-affected areas because of intense fighting and restrictions imposed by the warring parties. Still, few experts doubt that mass death is already underway, and that the situation is likely to rapidly deteriorate in the coming months. Already in February, a senior U.N. official warned the Security Council that 222,000 Sudanese children could die in the following months. A more recent study by the Clingendael Institute, a Dutch research group, estimated that up to 2.5 million people could die from hunger-related causes in Sudan by October. Since fighting broke out in April 2023 at least nine million Sudanese have been scattered from their homes. As many as 150,000 may have died, the U.S. envoy to Sudan, Tom Perriello, has estimated, although he adds that accurate figures are impossible to obtain. Residents returning to a part of the capital, Khartoum, that saw fierce fighting in April, made lentils to distribute to other families.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times The areas where the famine threat is highest include the western region of Darfur, where the siege of a major city has brought fears of a massacre; the capital, Khartoum; and the country’s breadbasket in Jazeera State, the I.P.C. said. The map locates the country of Sudan in northeastern Africa. It also locates Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, and Jazeera State, southeast of Khartoum. The western Sudanese region of Darfur is also indicated. By The New York Times. “This is the single largest humanitarian crisis on the planet,” Samantha Power, the head of USAID, told reporters on June 14. Ms. Power and other American officials have repeatedly accused the war’s belligerents — Sudan’s national military and a powerful paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces — of using starvation as a weapon of war. Foreign sponsors fueling the fighting have also come under scrutiny, in particular the United Arab Emirates, which backs the Rapid Support Forces, and Iran, which has supplied drones to the military. The Emirates has also donated $100 million in aid to Sudan, a gift it described as its commitment to a “peaceful resolution” of the war. Yet despite the scale of the unfolding crisis, Sudan’s war has failed to attract the kind of top-level attention that was lavished on the Darfur crisis two decades ago, when Sudan became a major focus for both the White House and celebrities like the movie star George Clooney. The United Nations says it has received 17 percent of the $2.7 billion it has requested for Sudan. “World leaders continue to go through the motions, expressing concern over Sudan’s crisis,” said Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, the head of Mercy Corps, a global aid organization. “Yet they’ve failed to rise to the occasion.” A blast hole in the wall of a hospital in Omdurman, in April.Credit...Ivor Prickett for The New York Times Declan Walsh is the chief Africa correspondent for The Times based in Nairobi, Kenya. He previously reported from Cairo, covering the Middle East, and Islamabad, Pakistan. More about Declan Walsh A version of this article appears in print on June 28, 2024, Section A, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Catastrophic’ Famine Conditions Grip Sudan Copyright 2024 The New York Times Company Violence in Sudan Fighting between two military factions has thrown Sudan into chaos, with plans for a transition to a civilian-led democracy now in shambles. What to Know: Two generals — one backed by Sudan’s army, the other by a powerful paramilitary group — have been vying for power in the African country in a conflict that began in 2023. Toward the Abyss: A year of fighting has turned Sudan’s once proud capital, Khartoum, into a charred battleground. Now a famine threatens one of Africa’s biggest countries. A Dire Situation: At least 750,000 people are on the brink of starvation and death in Sudan, where the war has left over half the country’s 48 million people in a situation of chronic hunger, experts warned. A War on the Nile Pushes Sudan Toward the Abyss A year of fighting has turned the once proud capital, Khartoum, into a charred battleground. Millions have fled. Now a famine threatens in one of Africa’s biggest countries. June 5, 2024

By Dake Kang Activists are urging Unilever, a major investor in Myanmar, to speak out against the country's treatment of its Rohingya minority, which the U.N. has said may be "crimes against humanity." More than 10,000 people have joined the Facebook group for the campaign, known by the hashtag #WeAreAllRohingyaNow, and hundreds have signed on. A letter sent this week to Unilever CEO Paul Polman asked the company to clarify its stance on the Rohingya. "Silence in the face of genocide, whilst doing business, is simply not an option," said Britain-based campaign organizer Jamila Hanan. "Multinational corporations must start to speak out. They must be obliged to use their power and influence to help bring about a more just society in the regions in which they operate." Unilever did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Rights groups accuse the Myanmar army of burning homes, mass killings and rape in their sweeping counterinsurgency campaign in Rakhine state, where most of the estimated 1 million Rohingya live. The Muslim Rohingya have long faced systematic discrimination in Myanmar, a majority-Buddhist country. Most do not have citizenship and are considered illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, even when they've lived in Myanmar for generations. The #WeAreAllRohingyaNow group is seeking a restoration of citizenship rights denied to the Rohingya by a military government in 1982. Hanan says the group chose to target Unilever because it has been responsive to activists in the past. Unilever, with some $55 billion in revenue last year, is one of the world's largest consumer goods companies. Billions across the world buy Unilever-made Dove soap, Lipton tea, and Hellmann's mayonnaise. The company's first factory in Myanmar opened in 2013. It now manufactures food and shampoo near Yangon. Polman is a major advocate for corporate social responsibility and has won dozens of awards in eight years at Unilever's helm. He recently signed an open letter to the U.N. citing concerns about Myanmar's military offensives in Rakhine State — but not on behalf of Unilever, which has kept silent on the country's politics. "We're not asking for great things," Hanan said. "We're hoping that it will lead to a statement of concern. That would be a huge step forward. It's something corporations don't do." She said the group is waiting until next week to see if Unilever responds and if it doesn't it will start contacting members of the board of directors and shareholders directly. They plan to target other companies. "We're not going away," she said. Myanmar recently emerged from decades of isolationist military rule, holding landmark elections in 2015. Foreign investors rushed in, putting billions of dollars into one of Asia's fastest growing economies. Persecution of the Rohingya has intensified after deadly communal conflict with Rakhine Buddhists broke out in 2012. The latest bout of violence flared in October after an attack on a guard post left nine officers dead. It has displaced hundreds of thousands of people since then. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________- (c) 2017 Associated Press

By Danica Kirka LONDON — Authorities in London charged five people Monday over an unprovoked attack on a 17-year-old Iranian-Kurdish asylum-seeker as police sought to piece together the mob violence that involved up to 30 people. London's Metropolitan Police say the five were charged with violent disorder, with one also being charged with racially aggravated grievous bodily harm following the attack Friday in the London borough of Croydon. Three others remain in custody. Police said a group of youths approached the teen at a bus stop and questioned him. Upon learning he was an asylum-seeker, they chased him through the streets and beat him. The attack only stopped after police sirens could be heard and bystanders intervened. The teen's two friends got away. The teen has been hospitalized with a fractured skull and a blood clot on the brain but police say he is starting to make a recovery and may be moved out of intensive care Monday. Detectives are trying to find the victim's family, who live in Iran. He has not been named. As the investigation has progressed, police have increased their estimates of the number of people involved in the highly unusual incident. "I think this was probably confidence by numbers," Detective Superintendent Jane Corrigan said. "It started off with this smaller group of people, who were joined by between 20 to 30, and they just viciously attacked these individuals because they were asylum-seekers." The five people arrested by police are: Daryl Davis, 20, Danyelle Davis, 24, Barry Potts, 20, George Walder, 20, and Jack Walder, 24. All are from Croydon and have been charged with violent disorder. George Walder has been additionally charged with racially aggravated grievous bodily harm. The attack has prompted strong condemnation from London's mayor and police officials. ___ This story corrects charge to grievous instead of gross bodily harm. ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) Associated Press 2017

By Dan Levin Justine Nkurunziza, left, and Tabitha Mukamusoni fled violence in Burundi and sought asylum in Canada. “All those who dare to speak the truth, they are targeted,” Ms. Nkurunziza said of her homeland.CreditDave Chan for The New York Times In the days since six Burundian students slipped away from a robotics competition in Washington, D.C. — with at least two of them making their way across the border to Canada — many have questioned what propelled the teenagers to avoid returning home. Yet, Justine Nkurunziza is not among those who are wondering. Like the teenagers and hundreds of other Burundians, Ms. Nkurunziza, 57, followed a well-trod path north last year into Canada, the final stop in a desperate journey to escape the violence that is racking their tiny central African nation. “They are saved,” said Ms. Nkurunziza, the president of an election monitoring organization in Burundi, who says she was marked for assassination by government security forces. “Those young people took the opportunity to flee from the killings, just like I did.” Since 2015, around 300,000 people have fled Burundi amid the unrest that followed a decision by the country’s president, Pierre Nkurunziza, to seek a third term in violation of constitutional term limits. (Ms. Nkurunziza is not related to the president.) Despite protests, a failed coup attempt and an election boycott by opposition parties, Mr. Nkurunziza emerged victorious in a vote that Western observers roundly criticized as rigged. Over the past two years, the United Nations has documented hundreds of summary executions, assassinations, torture and other crimes. The Burundian government has denied the findings, and responded by becoming the first country to withdraw from the International Criminal Court, The Hague-based tribunal responsible for trying crimes against humanity. Thousands have fled to refugee camps in Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, where they face reprisals from marauding Burundian militias that have carried out targeted killings, human rights groups and refugees say. Burundians in 2015 aboard a boat taking them to Tanzania. In refugee camps there, they face reprisals from Burundian militias. CreditJerome Delay/Associated Press The disappearance of the Burundian teenagers, including two who the Metropolitan Police Department on Tuesday confirmed had been found safe in Canada, thrust a simmering African crisis into the international spotlight and underscored Canada’s reception to those seeking refuge from war and political violence. As the administration of President Trump is seeking to stanch the flow of refugees into the United States, Canada has taken the opposite approach. In May, the Canadian government designated refugee claims from Burundi, along with those from Afghanistan, Egypt and Yemen, as eligible for expedited processing, allowing the authorities to accept the claims without a hearing. The expedited-processing policy, put in place in 2015, also applies to refugees from Syria, Iraq and Eritrea. Canada’s tightknit Burundian community of roughly 10,000 has welcomed the stream of new arrivals since the crisis erupted. Over the past two years, Canada’s Refugee Protection Division has approved claims from 690 Burundians, according to government figures. More than 2,000 Burundian refugees have arrived in the United States in the past two and a half years, according to the State Department. Benjamin Manirakiza, first counselor in the Burundian Embassy in Washington, denied that the government was targeting opponents, and said the teenagers were probably seeking a better life in North America. “Burundi went through troubles, and security now is not perfect,” he said. “Maybe they are seeking more opportunities.” Officials at the Burundian Embassy in Ottawa did not respond to interview requests. Ms. Nkurunziza, who led the Civil Society Coalition for Election Monitoring, was a prominent witness to the violent collapse of her nation’s fragile democracy, and she said it was her outspoken criticism of the president’s decision to seek a third term that had thrust her into the government’s cross hairs. During a trip Ms. Nkurunziza made in May 2015 to the Tanzanian city of Dar es Salaam to lobby the United Nations and the African Union, a failed coup in Burundi prompted the president to close the borders and label civil society groups as enemies of the republic. Ms. Nkurunziza fled with her small suitcase to Rwanda, as did her family, she said. “All the main civil society leaders, all the intellectuals, all those who dare to speak the truth, they are targeted,” she said. “They are killed.” Fearful of possible genocide in Burundi, human rights groups were urging the United Nations to send in a civilian protection force, and Ms. Nkurunziza was scheduled to help make the case in New York last summer. While awaiting an American visa, however, she claimed her life was threatened. Upon landing in New York, she traveled to the home of relatives in Portland, Me., and then stayed for three weeks in a shelter in Buffalo before crossing the border at Niagara, Ontario. President Pierre Nkurunziza in 2015, the year he won re-election in a vote that Western observers said was rigged. CreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times Asked why she had sought asylum in Canada and not the United States, she paused and took a deep breath. “I wasn’t feeling secure in the U.S. because everyone can have a gun,” she said, recalling the sound of gunshots that traumatized her in Burundi. Most of the Burundians in Canada came in the 1990s, fleeing ethnic massacres between Hutus and Tutsis that spilled over from the genocide in Rwanda. These days, many of the refugees who make it to Canada are young people who were involved in the protests that swept Bujumbura, the Burundian capital, in 2015. During an interview last week at a government apartment in Ottawa, two of those protesters, both 21, described the climate of terror that had prompted them to flee their homeland. They insisted on not being identified, saying they feared for the safety of family members left behind. In hushed voices, they recounted carrying anti-government banners amid throngs of young protesters and escaping after the coup attempt and the brutal government crackdown that drove scores of youths into hiding to avoid militias and neighborhood informants. A Burundian in Ottawa. He fled the country after being involved in the 2015 protests.CreditDave Chan for The New York Times One of the men got an American visa to attend college in the United States, but said he had no intention of attending. After arriving in New York, he took a Greyhound bus to Plattsburgh, N.Y., and then a taxi to the border. From there he crossed into Canada, where he told Canadian immigration officials that he was a refugee and that he had an aunt in Ottawa. In the fall, he plans to enroll at the University of Ottawa to study computer engineering. Even as scores of journalists were fleeing Burundi in 2015, Tabitha Mukamusoni, 33, a stringer for Voice of America, stayed behind to cover the mounting violence, despite repeated threats from the militias, she said. But after she reported on the shooting deaths of a Burundian journalist and his wife and two children by the police that October, a phone call from a police official spurred her to escape. “He said, ‘You’ve signed your death warrant,’” she said in an interview last week. “I knew if I don’t leave, they’ll kill me.” Ms. Mukamusoni fled with her son to Rwanda, followed the next day by her husband and daughter; she lived there for a year, covering the refugee crisis before going to Uganda to report on activists who had been attacked by Burundian militias. Invited to speak at a conference in Canada and fearing for her life, she flew to Montreal in October 2016 and claimed asylum. Today she lives in a house in Ottawa with other female refugees. But separated from her husband and two young children, who remain in Rwanda, she finds that every day is a struggle. “Without my family I live here hopeless,” she said, wiping away tears. “I’m safe, but it’s not easy.” _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The New York Times