When we spoke in April with a woman who had survived a Rapid Support Forces (RSF) massacre on the border of Sudan, she did not ask for revenge. For more than two years, the RSF has carried out attacks in the country that amount to crimes against humanity. But instead, the woman asked whether anyone would write down what had happened to her—whether it would be believed, and whether it would matter.
That question, repeated to both of us for decades across war zones, is the reason for the International Criminal Court (ICC), established by the Rome Statute in 2002. It is also the reason that our organization, the Reckoning Project, trains citizens to turn what they have survived into evidence that a court can use. And it is precisely the thing that the United States under President Donald Trump has set out to dismantle.
When we spoke in April with a woman who had survived a Rapid Support Forces (RSF) massacre on the border of Sudan, she did not ask for revenge. For more than two years, the RSF has carried out attacks in the country that amount to crimes against humanity. But instead, the woman asked whether anyone would write down what had happened to her—whether it would be believed, and whether it would matter.
