The two greatest humanitarian catastrophes on earth at the moment are in Africa. In Sudan, a civil war rages while as many as five million people may die of starvation. And in the Democratic Republic of Congo, home to some of the world’s most valuable rare earth minerals, violence has erupted in the east, displacing millions and threatening to ignite a brutal regional world.

Yet a world obsessed with great power conflict, with Gaza, and with trade wars largely once again ignores the plight of some of the world’s poorest people in the very places that endured Darfur and the Rwandan genocides a generation ago. Indeed, the world’s most powerful country is pulling back even the small resources it does contribute.

To understand and shed light on these human tragedies and what might be done, we spoke with Michelle Gavin, former U.S. ambassador to Botswana and senior Africa policy expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. This is must reading for those who care about the forgotten and the desperate and a continent that has endured horror for too long.

Octavian Report: Can you explain the situation in Sudan?

Michelle Gavin: I think it helps to begin back in 2019. Sudan had been ruled by an authoritarian, extremely violent regime for decades. This was the same government that was in control during the genocide in Darfur. In 2019, the Sudanese people essentially rose up and demanded democracy and a change in government. It started with bread riots, but quickly spread to much more fundamental demands for change, and the movement was nationwide. It was very strong, and eventually the military of Sudan could see which way the tide was turning, and they seized control of the government, ousted President Bashir and Sudan moved into a period of transition. The idea was that the military and civilians would govern together until they could kind of get it together to do a free and fair election.

In this transitional period, it became clear that the military was not interested in sharing power with civilians. But that military started to split, started to fracture. You have the Sudanese Armed Forces, which is a form of military, and you have the RSF, the rapid support forces. This is a militia created by Bashir as well, that used to work hand in glove with the armed forces. That was the war that broke out in 2023. They started fighting amongst themselves for access to power.

This struggle has been unbelievably costly to the Sudanese people. Sudan is the world's worst humanitarian crisis. The atrocities committed by both sides are numerous, well documented, and appalling. And neither side seems ready to envision anything other than total victory, or perhaps partition.

Octavian Report: Is it a religious dispute, given the history of Sudan, or more of a power grab?

Michelle Gavin: This is not a religious conflict at all. The vast majority of the Sudanese people are Muslims. There are concerns about extremists who are a part of the coalition backing the Sudanese Armed Forces. There is a bit of a socioeconomic class rift here. The RSF tends to be comprised of fighters who did not have a lot of access to money, power, and social capital.

But the RSF is run by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo [commonly known as Hemedti] and his brother, and they have numerous lucrative investments in gold mining and other business interest. As in so many countries without any kind of democratic accountability, the security forces have been deeply embedded into the economy of Sudan. And at the elite levels of these two fighting groups, you're not really talking about economic distinction. If I had to draw a distinction between the RSF and the SAF. I would be much more likely to point to status in society than I would.

That said, many of the atrocities being committed in the western part of Sudan are very clearly targeted at specific ethnicities.

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Octavian Report: Can you talk about the various foreign powers involved?

Michelle Gavin: On the side of the Sudanese Armed Forces, you have Egypt and Turkey. You have Russia, which plays a role on both sides of this conflict. Russia is interested in access to a base at Port Sudan, on the Red Sea. [Also, Saudi Arabia and Iran.] The RSF are alleged to get a lot of support from the United Arab Emirates. A lot of that support comes through Chad. And to some degree the Russians as well, because there's a longstanding relationship between elements of the RSF and what used to be the Wagner Group of mercenaries bound up in illicit gold mining.

Octavian Report: So is it mainly about the port and the resources?

Michelle Gavin: It's in part about the port. For some it's about ideology. The Emirati position appears to be both a concern about some of the radical extremists that appear to be part of the SAF coalition and a concern about Iran, which has been providing some drones and other support to the SAF.

I think kind of a mixed bag of motives there. It's not all about resources. If you look at the Egyptian case, it’s sort of ideological affinity. They like military governments, because they're a military government.

Octavian Report: How many people have died in the crisis?

Michelle Gavin: It's impossible to know how many people have died because it's so hard to get access to Sudan. The known numbers are probably no reflection of the actual numbers. What we do know that over 12 million people have had to flee from their homes.

We know that famine is occurring right now in at least five different parts of Sudan. Famine is at the top of the humanitarian crisis pyramid. A bunch of other things have to have gone wrong for you to get to the point of famine. So if there's famine that usually means there's been no access to medical care for a very long time. There's been probably no access to clean water.

So the estimates from credible food security experts suggests that famine alone, not the atrocities and the bombings, the torture, but famine alone will kill as many as two million people. I've seen estimates as high as five million by the end of this calendar year.

Octavian Report: How many have died just in the violence?

Michelle Gavin: They're in the hundreds of thousands.

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Octavian Report: Why are none of the Western powers, including the United States, not paying attention to this?

Michelle Gavin: There's a great deal of distraction in the international community, certainly, because of Ukraine and Gaza. Those crises are sucking up an awful lot of the oxygen in the foreign policy community. Certainly in the U.S.

There is also, I think, a sense of “well, what would we do?” Obviously, military intervention is not something anyone has an appetite for. When things were horrifying in Darfur a couple decades ago, eventually there was a UN force deployed with Security Council approval to try to help protect civilians. But because the Security Council is dysfunctional now, and unable to really move forward on much of anything.

"We have taken a whole set of tools we had in the toolbox—not just to help innocent civilians in terrible situations, but to weigh in and influence the actors who are driving these conflicts—and thrown them away."

To give credit where it's due, the Biden administration did apply some targeted sanctions on leaders on either side of this conflict, trying to increase the costs of continuing fighting. There was a special envoy appointed, who tried to engage in diplomacy not to a lot of effect. A lot of people have been trying desperately to sound the alarm for quite some time now about humanitarian access issues, because Sudan has a long history of denying food, water, and medical supplies to civilians who need it.

But you hear less about that now, since from a U.S. perspective we no longer seem to have the will to engage in significant humanitarian assistance anywhere?

Octavian Report: So let's switch gears for a minute to Congo. Violence has broken out, with the fall of the city of Goma recently. Can you explain the situation there.

Michelle Gavin: In Congo, the real concern right now centers around M23, a rebel movement that has seized control of significant and very mineral rich parts of Eastern Congo. Congo is a vast, vast country at the heart of Central Africa and the government has very limited capacity to assert its authority throughout that vast territory. Eastern Congo has been the site of a great deal of insecurity and instability for several decades.

“In 1994 about 800,000 people were killed in a genocide, most of them hacked to death with machetes.”

The M23 is a rebel movement backed by Rwanda. Rwanda will say they don't back them, but it's well documented by the UN and others that it has operated in this area for some time. They seized Goma, which is the capital of North Kivu and a major Eastern city, before but some diplomacy walked that back. That was about 12 years ago.

But now they're back. And not only have they taken Goma, they've taken Bukavu. It looks like they're moving to Uvira. Rwanda will say we are very concerned, for obvious historical reasons, about our security, and Rwanda does have some of its own military deployed in Eastern Congo, and they will say that is to protect Congolese citizens of Tutsi descent – the Tutsi were the victims of the 1994 Rwandan genocide -- and to fight rump elements of that genocidal regime. But Rwanda's intervention has made it more difficult for Congolese of Tutsi descent who are now being conflated with a foreign military occupation. It's not great for their safety. And that rump force from the genocidal government of Rwanda in the nineties is not a significant player in the context of the many, many armed groups in Eastern Congo.

But it's more complex than that I'm afraid. You also have Ugandan troops operating in North Kivu concerned about a rebel group that has waged attacks inside Uganda. And you have Burundian troops operating in Congo at the request of the Congolese government. And so the potential for interstate conflict and proxy conflict on Congolese soil is extremely high.

There's a lot of talk about these different security concerns. But there's also the tremendously lucrative mineral resources in this part of Congo and the M23 has seized mines. And those resources are extracted and shipped straight across the border to Rwanda, where they're then sold on. So there are very clear economic incentives for what's happening as well.

Octavian Report: Can you talk a bit about the rare earth minerals and other metals?

Michelle Gavin: Sure. To the extent that Congo attracts a lot of international attention, it's usually either concern about the Congo basin, which is one of the world's two lungs, or interest in its incredibly rich reserves of critical minerals. Congo has always been understood to be rich in copper but they also have a lot of coltan, a lot of cobalt, which are very important resources for the tech economy.

And the Chinese have been aggressive in courting the Congolese, making deals and controlling vast concessions for mining purposes. But out in the east, there’s a bit of a Wild West element to a lot of the mining, just because the insecurity is so great. So both Uganda and Rwanda have been enjoying significant profits from mining in the East for some time. It's a place where it's very difficult for more conventional mining companies to do business. So typically, things are extracted and then moved across the border. And then you'll see more recognizable actor engaged in that trade.

Octavian Report: Can you recount the events of the genocide and tell us what Rwanda and its president Paul Kagame are trying to accomplish?

Michelle Gavin: To quickly recap one of the last century's worst episodes, in 1994 about 800,000 people were killed in a genocide, most of them hacked to death with machetes in the very tiny and very densely populated country of Rwanda.

You had a ethnic majority. I say “ethnic,” but there's a lot to unpack there in the way ethnicity has been constructed in Rwanda and the role the Belgians had in it. But for the purposes of trying to give a capsule history, you had a government dominated by ethnic Hutus, an increasingly extremist kind of Hutu nationalist government, that unleashed a horrifying campaign of violence aimed at the Tutsi minority. Some moderate Hutus were also targeted.

That war ended when the Rwandan Patriotic Army – now the Rwandan Patriotic Front, the ruling party of Rwanda – defeated that extremist government and seized control of the country. Paul Kagame, head of the RPF and President of Rwanda for quite some time now, and likely to go for another term, is an incredibly savvy leader who demands a lot of discipline and has focused a great deal of his attention on building partnerships for Rwanda focused on development. They've had some real significant development gains, although some of those have come into question because the statistics come from the government of Rwanda, and the integrity of those processes is not always clear.

But and in making these ties to wealthy donors, foreign assistance donors but also major philanthropists, Rwanda has clearly pursued a strategy over time of making itself to some degree indispensable. So Rwanda has become an exporter of security. In some situations there are Rwandans helping the Mozambicans fight terrorists in Cabo Delgado. Rwandans participate in peacekeeping missions. It's a disciplined, well-resourced military.

But they've been exporting insecurity to Eastern Congo for years and engaging in a campaign of extraterritorial assassinations aimed at critics of the government. This is one reason there's a very bad relationship between Rwanda and South Africa, because Rwandan dissidents have been assassinated on South African soil.

"I think there's a degree of racism at play where there's some kind of assumption that Africa is always in turmoil."

Octavian Report: How many people have died in the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi area since all the conflict started?

Michelle Gavin: If we're starting in the nineties, we're north of five million for sure. It's been a volatile part of the world for quite some time.

From a humanitarian perspective, Congo comes in second only to Sudan in terms of the number of people in need of humanitarian assistance. So many people in eastern Congo have fled their homes, then had to flee whatever camp they went to, then had to flee again. People have been displaced multiple times, so any kind of capital that they had, be it a garden plot, a goat, all of this is gone.

Children aren't being educated. Sexual violence is rampant. And it's just very hard to support yourself if you're constantly having to flee for your life with with no possessions. So there is a great deal of humanitarian need and a lot of concern about this generation of young people having had such disrupted and violent formative years. These people didn't do anything wrong.

They’ve just been living in an atmosphere of so much insecurity despite a UN peacekeeping mission more than two decades old that still hasn't completely wound down. Peacekeepers have come from the Southern African Development Community from the East African Community.

But there is no peace, no lasting peace in Eastern Congo. So the toll on civilians is absolutely devastating.

Octavian Report: Can anything be done to stop this? Why has the West looked away?

Michelle Gavin: It’s incredibly foolish. The world needs Congo, both for minerals and because we really need the Congo Basin forest to exist the same way we need the Amazon. It's one of the world's two major carbon sinks. The world needs Congo, I think.

What could be done? The last time the M23 was ascendant there was a lot of pressure on Rwanda. But we lived in a different world. And what we're seeing now is a world in which the rules of the game internationally are not so clear. So Paul Kagame has made speeches about Greater Rwanda, about how the kingdom used to include significantly more territory, parts of Congo, parts of Uganda.

You know I can think of another leader who has the same kind of irredentist agenda to try and restore the grandeur of the past, and has invaded his neighbor to seize territory. You asked earlier about what Rwanda really wants. Yes, they want access to resources, and they demand security.

“The world needs Congo, both for minerals and because we really need the Congo Basin forest to exist the same way we need the Amazon. It's one of the world's two major carbon sinks."

But they might want Greater Rwanda, or maybe they want a repeat of what happened in the Congo war that led to the end of the Mobutu regime, where Rwandan-backed rebels swept all the way across the country to Kinshasa and unseated the government. There is a lot of nervousness clearly in Kinshasa right now about how long President Tshisekedi can hold on. You don't see him traveling because of obvious fears of a coup.

There hasn't been as much pressure on Rwanda as there was before. And there is a loss of confidence in the Congolese government. So sometimes people feel like they have to choose one side or the other, the government in Kinshasa or the government in Kigali and the government in Kinshasa is corrupt and in many ways incompetent.

But that doesn't actually mean that anything's going to be better to allow a neighbor to invade and install its preferred option.

Octavian Report: Are you concerned about how the shutdown of USAID might affect these two crises and also the potential spread of Ebola and other infectious diseases?

Michelle Gavin: Hair on fire concerned. I am hair on fire concerned because even with all of our capacities in the global humanitarian system, which in many ways has relied upon the U.S. for a long time, we were looking at something horrific by way of famine in Sudan.

Past is prologue. Continued conflict in Congo means more horrific suffering. And this kind of dismantling of our capacities is a problem, despite the notion that there have been waivers. We've dismantled payment systems. The money is not getting to the people who need it because we fired everybody. It takes people to make these things happen.

“I am hair on fire concerned about the dismantling of USAID. The money is not getting to the people who need it.”

So you can have a waiver, but if you have no one to execute it, and you have no payment system to move resources, it's a nice piece of paper. So what we're seeing right now is a very sudden gutting of our capacity to respond to these things, and I would add a gutting of our leverage.

One of the things that convinced Paul Kagame to cool it with the M23 before was threatening to cut off Rwanda's assistance from the Us. But we already did that. We cut off everybody's assistance, so no more leverage, right?

It's not a very credible thing to say, “Oh, well, maybe yours would come back if you do what we say.” We have taken a whole set of tools we had in the toolbox not just to help innocent civilians in terrible situations, but to weigh in and influence the actors who are driving these conflicts.

I am absolutely horrified. And you're absolutely right when it comes to infectious disease. The notion that it's going to stay over there is incredibly foolish.

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Octavian Report: People in Africa have commented their dismay at the almost obsession in this country with Gaza. No matter what you’re view of that conflict is, these situations are arguably worse yet they are very much out of the conversation. They are virtually ignored by the media and well-meaning people. Why is that, especially given Congo’s strategic minerals

Michelle Gavin: I think there's a degree of racism at play where there's some kind of assumption that Africa is always in turmoil. I'm amazed at how often people assume it's ethnically based. And a “there's nothing to be done” kind of attitude. So I think there's a little bit of that.

I don't think that's all of it by by any stretch. There is, particularly with eastern Congo, this “Isn't it always a mess?” And it has been a terrible mess for a long time. And bringing security to that whole side of the country is a multifaceted and potentially multi-generational project. So there's not a quick fix.

But there are certainly things that could be done to stop this M23 offensive, and prevent the prospect of Ugandans fighting Rwandans on Congolese soil, and Rwandans fighting Burundians.

But to have a lasting kind of stability, so that the people of eastern Congo have more opportunity and dignity and security, that's a long proposition. So I think some of it's sort of like, “So hard and so complicated.”

Sudan is an interesting case. Because, you're right, you don't have the same strategic minerals. But you know, for about thirty years the U.S. government was incredibly focused on a change in government in Sudan. Because Bashir supported Al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden spent a bunch of time in Sudan. We had real security concerns and very real concerns about the steps that the Sudanese government took that were clearly antithetical to core U.S. interests.

"Botswana’s diamond wealth is not in a bunch of Swiss bank accounts. It’s in the roads you drive on. It’s in the access to health care that people in Botswana have."

And now it seems that there's a failure of clear strategic thinking about what the potential costs of a divided Sudan in which fighters, arms, and money slosh around across borders. And what that might mean for U.S. interests, for Iranian interests, for Russian interests. There just seems to be a unwillingness to look forward and think about how best to protect our own equities.

Octavian Report: I’m going to end on a positive note on Africa. You were ambassador to Botswana, which has been a legitimate success story on the continent. Why has it thrived and what can we learn from it?

Michelle Gavin: I could not be more delighted by that question, because I think more people should know about Botswana. Because it is an extraordinary success. There is no landlocked, small-population country in the world that's ever done what they did. That is, to go from the bottom of every development index at independence in 1966 when they had thirty kilometers of paved road in a country the size of France, about thirty total university graduates in the population, to an upper-middle-income country, peaceful, democratic. In their last election, the population absolutely rose up in disgust against the longtime ruling BDP and ushered in the opposition.

This happened peacefully. The transition was smooth. There's so much to admire about Botswana.

Octavian Report: Was it the diamond wealth?

Michelle Gavin: The diamond wealth, you're right, is significant. But I would remind everyone that Congo also has diamonds. Angola has diamonds. Zimbabwe has diamonds. Their trajectory has not been great in comparison. Botswana's diamond wealth is not in a bunch of Swiss bank accounts. It's in the roads you drive on. It's in the access to health care that people in Botswana have.

And I really think it boils down to governance. They were blessed by some pretty visionary founding leadership from Sir Seretse Khama and some successive Presidents who continued to build upon it, who believed in the rule of law, who believed that there was no group in the country who had any kind of natural right to more resources, services, or status than any other. And they built something pretty extraordinary.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

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