BBC finds RSF deliberately targeted Sudan hospitals

The Weather of Hospitals

One notes, in the record of the war in Sudan, that a broadcaster had to investigate whether hospitals were being hit on purpose. The hospitals themselves were never in doubt. Their walls are a matter of physical record, as are their roofs or the lack of them. What was missing was a single adjective, and the BBC went looking for it. By its account it found one: deliberately. The Rapid Support Forces stand accused, by a news organisation, of a choice. One learns to notice when the damage is accepted long before anyone will say how it happened.

Consider the specimens in the order they arrive. A hospital is struck, and that is an event. It is struck again, and that is a pattern, though no one is yet obliged to call it one. The pattern is studied by journalists, and that is an investigation. The investigation is published, and that is a finding. The finding is contested, and that is a controversy. The UN human rights chief, Volker Türk, then says that the attacks may amount to war crimes, and that is an assessment. At no point in this sequence is any building rebuilt. Each stage produces a document, and each document is filed a little further from the rubble.

I do not mock the caution. The strongest case for it is a good one. Intent is the hinge on which the law of war turns. A hospital hit in crossfire, a hospital an armed group has occupied, and a hospital chosen from a map as a target are three different acts in the eyes of a tribunal. Accusing a force of the third without proof cheapens the charge for every future case where it is true. That is why Mr Türk says “may”, and he is right to. The conditional tense exists because accusations are permanent and evidence is not.

Still, I keep a ledger of what that caution does in practice, and the ledger shows something odd. The burden of proving intent has moved. Nobody legislated the move. It happened because the bodies that could compel testimony, seize orders and question commanders mostly do not reach this war. So the work falls to whoever can get there with a camera and a satellite subscription. The broadcaster becomes the forensic unit. The UN office becomes a commentator on the broadcaster. One cannot call this a conspiracy, because it is a vacancy. Vacancies are less dramatic and much more durable.

Picture a ward clerk somewhere in Sudan, or any of the clerks whose names will never appear in a finding. Each morning she writes the date at the top of the admissions book. One morning the book stops. Nothing in the book records why it stopped. A broadcaster, months later, works out from shell fragments, witnesses and imagery what the book could not say. The book is the more honest document. It never claimed to know.

Now the hypothesis, offered with no more credulity than the official language asks of us. Judging by the grammar of international response, hospitals in Sudan are destroyed by a kind of weather. Weather has no author. It is measured, reported and regretted, and its patterns may be studied for years without anyone suggesting it chose its targets. Damage “occurs”. Facilities “are affected”. Access to care “deteriorates”, the way a coastline does. Into this meteorology the BBC has introduced a scandalous idea: that the weather has a commander, and the commander has a list. The scandal is not that this is implausible. It is that the claim needed a newsroom to make it sayable at all, and once made it was immediately classified as contested, which is the filing drawer where claims wait until they stop being urgent.

The RSF may dispute the finding, and the finding should be tested. A naturalist insists on that. But the naturalist also notes what the testing is for. It sorts the dead into those killed by intent and those killed by circumstance, and that distinction matters enormously to a court and not at all to a patient on a ventilator when the power fails.

So the catalogue ends where it began. It holds a finding, a “may”, a dispute, and an admissions book whose final page is dated and otherwise blank. Which of these documents will a court eventually read? And which one already knows what happened?