On 15 October 2023, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, the United Nations’ Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, published a statement on the 7 October attacks the previous week, and what had happened since.
The statement was trenchant in its criticism of “multiple and coordinated attacks” from terrorist organisations within the Gaza Strip, calling them “unacceptable” and “inexcusable”, but also cited “the loss of civilian lives resulting from Israeli bombardments in the Gaza Strip”, calling “for all possible measures to protect those who are most vulnerable”. It mentioned the “unacceptable withholding of Israeli hostages by Hamas in the area” and called for their unconditional release, but it also highlighted, “the vulnerability of Palestinian and other civilians remaining in or fleeing their homes in light of ongoing and escalating risks of violence irreversibly affecting them.”
It was a measured statement, carefully considered and discussed between the Special Advisor and her staff before publication. It was also a statement which would upend her life, lead to extraordinary attacks on her both from outside the UN as well as from within the organisation itself. It would culminate in the UN declining to renew her position when her term ended in late 2024. But speaking to me six months later, she said, without hesitation, “I can tell you, if we went back to October 7, I would issue the exact same statement.”
The first indication of internal pressure within the UN came when one of Wairimu Nderitu’s staffers told her that a junior staffer had criticised her statement to other UN staff.
“I was taken aback…it was unheard of for a junior colleague to be criticising a statement in a staff meeting” she said.
But the individual, whom she was told was Palestinian and had been seconded to New York from the UN High Commission for Human Rights in Geneva, would then go further. He then wrote to her directly, copying in her fellow Under-Secretary Generals, questioning whether she had thought of the reputation of the UN when issuing the statement.
“This is somebody who was about like five or six times my junior. It was shocking”.
She discussed this with senior UN colleagues and made the point that she would not be able to do her work if each time she issued a statement, “on Sudan, Sri Lanka, or Colombia, for example”, she received internal protests from UN staffers. They took her point and told her they would take care of the issue. But she kept receiving messages from junior UN employees criticising her actions.
At the same time, media outlets – Wairimu-Nderitu specifically mentions Qatar’s Al Jazeera, Saudi Arabia’s Al Arabiya and Chinese State media – began to regularly use UN press conferences to directly target her. “They would ask a very specific question, and they would really draw it out. ‘Why isn’t she calling the situation in Gaza genocide?’”
It was repeatedly made clear to journalists by UN spokespeople that the official position of the UN, including that of its senior officials, was not to refer to a conflict as a genocide unless it had specifically been designated as such by an international court such as the ICJ. But the media publications in question refused to accept that answer.
“It kept going, on and on and on”, she said. “They built that pressure. They literally created the justification for ‘she must go’.”
One of those reporters, she recalled, would later be invited to give a talk at Rutgers University.
“He gave a talk in which he mentioned me and Pramila [Patten], another Under-Secretary General [the UN Special Adviser on Sexual Violence in Conflict], who went to Israel and wrote a report about what had happened. He said the UN has been infiltrated by Zionists, and he named both of us.”
Alice Wairimu-Nderitu at the Srebrenice memorial
On 9 December 2023, Nderitu hosted an event she had been organising for a year, to mark the 75th anniversary of the creation of the UN Genocide Convention. It honoured Raphael Lemkin, the Jewish lawyer who had coined the term “genocide” to describe the actions of the Nazis. That same day, a public petition was launched, falsely claiming that Nderitu’s original statement had “failed to acknowledge Israel’s overwhelming violence against Palestinian civilians”. It condemned Nderitu for what it described as a “failure to fulfil her mandate”, demanded that the UN investigate her conduct and called for her immediate resignation.
Shortly after that, the death threats started.
“I felt sorry for my family”, says Wairimu-Nderitu. “When all the threats were coming in, they were very concerned – many were coming in on social media, so they could see them. The pressure was very intense.”
She described how within the UN she was then being told that perhaps she should issue a statement on genocide in Gaza – not because she believed it, but just to prevent further attacks on her.
“The daily press briefings, all these messages…colleagues were telling me, ‘what will it cost you just to put up a statement and say that you see clear risks of Israel perpetrating genocide?’ And I kept telling them, no, no, no.”
It is clear, talking to Nderitu, that she was deeply troubled, not by the focus on Gaza as much as the corresponding total lack of focus on any other terrible world crisis.
“This had not happened for any other conflict”, she said, referring to the protests against her based on her original statement. “Ukraine, the Congo, Sudan, Myanmar – I mean nothing, nothing like that whatsoever.”
In particular, the situation in Sudan troubled her.
“I went to Chad [the neighbouring country] and I had interviews with people from Darfur. I briefed the Security Council, and I was so clear, I told the Security Council, ‘My role is to identify risk factors for genocide and I’m here telling you that every single risk factor for genocide exists in Sudan’. I gave them very granular details of who was killing who in Sudan. And I told them, ‘Security Council, you have to act, because one day you’ll be held accountable for not acting on Sudan’. I then went to Geneva, and I briefed the Human Rights Council in great detail.”
I asked her whether there was any action. “Nobody, nobody”.
She described “zero interest” by the media in Sudan – except for the BBC. But even for the UK broadcaster, there were limits. “I told them, I wish you could have a [News] tab on Sudan on your website. You have a tab on Gaza. You have a tab on Ukraine. Where is your tab on Sudan?”
It became clear that there was what she described as “media prioritisation”.
“They would ask about Gaza every day, and I would say ‘ok, people are dying in other places too…I was issuing statements about Myanmar, South Sudan, the Sahel, the DRC [Democratic Republic of Congo], places where risk factors for genocide clearly existed, people dying in different parts of the world. And really, I didn’t get a single journalist in the daily press briefing saying she’s been speaking, you know, about South Sudan, or about DRC. It was, ‘why will she not say that there is a genocide in Gaza?’”
Wairimu-Nderitu looks at me.
“You know, South Sudan is actually on the verge of a genocide right now? In terms of Sudan, it is already being perpetrated, in South Sudan they are very close.”
With regards to Sudan, she describes the actions of the RSF [Rapid Support Forces] paramilitary in Darfur, who have killed tens of thousands within the last few years. Weeks after South Africa brought its case against Israel to the ICJ, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa welcomed the RSF’s leader, General Mohamed Dagalo, to Pretoria.
RSF leader General Mohamed Dagalo (l) was welcomed to Pretoria by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa (r) in early January 2024 (Photo: South African government)
“It was racial”, Wairimu-Nderitu said of the actions of the RSF in Darfur. “Those killed were darker skinned. When I went to the [refugee] camps, they would talk about being referred to as ‘slaves’. It’s very clear that this has happened. There’s so much evidence. I remember going to Yale University, and satellite imagery was showing us all the mass graves in Sudan and showing us how attacks happened.
“The International Criminal Court has not indicted anyone for what’s going on in Sudan now. The indictments that exist are for what happened in Darfur more than twenty years ago. And if that ever happens, or if the ICJ decides to take up the issue of Sudan the way they’ve been taking up the issue of Israel and Gaza, there is so much evidence that a genocide is in the course of being perpetrated in Sudan.”
Two weeks after my interview with Wairimu-Nderitu, the ICJ rejected a case accusing the United Arab Emirates of complicity in genocide in Sudan, claiming it did not have jurisdiction.
The Peace Palace, seat of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands (Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Velvet)
Nderitu speaks candidly about the UN’s lack of focus on the region.
“It’s fairly obvious, if you analyse the speeches and statements issued by various UN agencies and if you look at their websites, what flashes up is all Gaza focused. And you think, wait a minute. In Sudan, there’s almost zero UN presence on the ground, especially in Darfur, and so many people are dying of hunger. Isn’t that a place where we should be seeing things flashing up, saying that this is going on? Do people assume that ‘if Africans are fighting, they should just be left to fight’?
“We have farmers and herders killing each other in West and North Africa for the longest time, an issue that the world doesn’t take up at all. You won’t find anything. I used to work there; I was always going to funerals. I would go to funerals where 40 people had been killed, and I would go the following week to another funeral where 52 people had been killed. Then a break of two weeks, and then again, I would go to another funeral – another 40 people killed. Google ‘farmer-herder conflicts in West and North Africa’, you’ll be shocked by the number of people who have died.
“And so you wonder, at what point will the world pay attention to these kind of conflicts in the same way that it’s paying attention to Gaza?”
It is clear she feels that there is an obscene double standard at work. But then I ask her, the former United Nations’ Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, the direct question I have been wondering.
“You mentioned that you went and briefed different communities within the UN and said that when it came to Sudan, every single prerequisite that could lead to a genocide had been fulfilled. Did you feel differently about Gaza?”
She thinks carefully before answering.
“When the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin coined the word genocide, he called it ‘the crime of crimes’. In any court of law that tries genocide, the intention ‘to destroy an ethnic, racial, religious or national group in whole or in part’ has to be proved. Genocide is a crime of intent. You have to be very, very careful before you say, anywhere in the world, that anybody is at risk of genocide, unless you are sure intent can be proved. And the clarity I had for Sudan, I did not have it for Gaza, because as in any war, from the position I held in the UN, there are legal and moral issues to consider.”
She sees what is going on between Israel and Hamas as an armed conflict.
“Morally, nothing can justify the deaths of innocent civilians, both Palestinian and Israeli and my heart weeps for what is happening to them.”
“I’m a mediator. I’ve been mediating armed conflict long before I joined the UN. I’m one of the few women who are signatories to peace agreements; it’s a field that women haven’t been able to really get into at some point. We thought we were almost there, but we are back to where, if you look at Ukraine, you look at Gaza right now, you’ll see the mediators and negotiators are all men.
“By training, as a mediator, I’m trying to look at both sides and not to take sides with anyone. So, it was quite instructive for me to see that it was those who wanted to spread the narrative that Israel is perpetrating a genocide, who were accusing me of bias.”
By late-2024, it became clear that the United Nations was not going to renew Wairimu-Nderitu’s tenure. The organisation pointed to many other instances where those appointed to senior UN roles had only served one term, but there were also plenty of examples of individuals who had been reappointed. It seemed clear to many – including her – that the organisation’s decision had been based on the criticism she had received for refusing to describe Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza as a genocide.
Wairimu-Nderitu declines to talk about it, but earlier this year Francesca Albanese, an Italian serving as the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, was reappointed to her position despite clear evidence of extremely troubling past statements, including talking about “the Jewish lobby” in America.
But despite the fallout and her subsequent departure from the UN, Wairimu-Nderitu remains resolute in her outlook
“In the last meeting I had with staff in my office, I told them, ‘if 7 October happened today, I would issue the exact same statement’.
“I’m 100% sure that I’ll be proved right, and that in the fullness of time, more people will look at this with an understanding of how they’ve been led to certain thinking by the media, how the media can prioritize Gaza and Ukraine and just ignore the rest of the world, how international organisations can be speaking consistently about one war and not other wars”, she says.
“If we get a critical mass of people to see that way, then in the fullness of time, people will understand that I was right, that this, [Gaza] is an armed conflict.
“And in any conflict, we are supposed to look at it in terms of how we end the conflict, by mediating, by not taking sides. The UN says it believes in a two State solution, which as a mediator is not possible unless we listen to both sides and understand the root causes of this armed conflict.
“That’s what the UN was created for.”
