News Editor John O’Connor sits down with The New York Times’ Declan Walsh to discuss his recent Pulitzer Prize win, the civil war in Sudan, and the international impact of his reporting.
‘I went to UCD and I studied international commerce. And, you know, I think I realised pretty early on that commerce and business was not really my thing.’ Mr. Walsh says from his home in Nairobi, where he runs the New York Times Bureau as their chief Africa correspondent. ‘After [UCD] I went to the Sunday Business Post [...] and during that time I ended up, for various and slightly unusual reasons, coming to Kenya and then going to Sudan.’
The Mayo native has covered Sudan’s civil war since it erupted in April 2023. He has reported from the frontlines in Khartoum – where the Sudanese Armed Forces (S.A.F.) are locked in a brutal struggle with the Rapid Support Forces (R.S.F.) for control of Sudan’s ravaged capital – Mr. Walsh has extensively covered what he calls a ‘catastrophic battle for supremacy that is tearing the country apart.’ His reporting has revealed and documented the dismantling of the U.S. aid agency’s presence in Africa, allegations of Sudan’s military using chemical weapons, Sudan’s gold rush during a time of famine and ethnic cleansing and a Sudanese paramilitary group committing acts of genocide.
This powerful series of articles and necessary reporting exposing the ongoing atrocities in Sudan earned Mr. Walsh and his team this year’s Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting, journalism’s highest honor.
In Mr. Walsh’s speech, he thanked his wife, Nesrine Malik, who is from Sudan, saying, ‘Her support has meant everything to me in reporting this story, and what’s happened to her is a reminder that this is a story for us. It is much more than that for her. Thank you.’
For many foreign correspondents reporting on war, the country they are sent to is unfamiliar and their stories unlinked and detached. But for Mr. Walsh, the war in Sudan is more personal. He described the impact this conflict has had on ‘[Nesrine] and her family and how they're having to deal with the fact that the house that they have in Khartoum was overrun by fighters during the war.’ Mr. Walsh visited Nesrine’s family home when he was visiting Khartoum in March ‘because the city had changed hands. The RSF paramilitaries that had been in charge of most of the city during the war had just been pushed out by the army.’
People stayed [in Sudan], hoping the conflict would end - but it never did.
‘We came in behind the army forces. And eventually, as I was reporting, we just ended up in the same neighbourhood where my wife's family is from. And I was able to visit their family home, which is a place that I knew well. I'd been in a lot of houses and buildings that had been destroyed and looted. But it was quite affecting to go into one of those houses that I actually had known from before and had a lot of personal memories. It was a place of family and of love. And now it had been pulled apart by fighters. I've got to say, however it affects me, it's really much more profound for my wife's family and her broader family whose lives have really been torn apart by this war.’
On another visit to Khartoum Mr Walsh mentions how parts of the city were largely or even completely deserted, no electricity, no water and unexploded munitions in the buildings or on the streets.
On one visit Mr. Walsh ‘went to the National Museum where we found caskets that had been pulled open with mummies inside. The ancient gold artefacts had been looted. The National Archives, where there were actual rotting bodies in the garden. It was really striking how you've got this city with a really rich and sophisticated history. And a sophisticated society has been pulled apart by this senseless war. And unfortunately, there's really no sign at the moment about that conflict ending anytime soon.’
Mr Walsh’s remarks echoes those of Yahana, a Sudanese refugee and current UCD student and scholarship winner, who told The University Observer about the Forgotten War in Sudan in February, saying: ‘People stayed [in Sudan], hoping the conflict would end – but it never did’ and the violence continues and the international silence around it remains deafening.
Despite the lack of coverage Mr. Walsh sees it ‘as part of my job and the job of other reporters working in Sudan [to report on this war]. I think they mostly agree that our great struggle really is to try to bring home to people what the human cost of this war is. That's really at the centre of the work that we do.’
Mr. Walsh agrees that ‘people see this as an African conflict. And it's in a place that we don't know very much, you know, that we don't feel a great sense of connection with. And isn’t as worthy of our attention, which I think is really unfortunate.’ He says that there are many reasons why we should care, especially ‘when you look at the scale of the suffering, the scale of the fighting, the numbers of people who've been displaced or killed or who are starving from an actual famine that's been spreading for over a year now.’
The civil war in Sudan has forced over 12 million people to flee their homes and as violence continues to escalate, people are desperately seeking safety and protection. The United Nations (U.N.) now says Sudan is home to the world’s largest displacement crisis and was characterised as a ‘living nightmare’ by Amy Pope, director general of the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration. With this in mind, the absence of the civil war in Sudan on our screens, in an age where almost everything is documented and under increasing surveillance, makes it all the more shocking and disheartening from a journalistic and humanitarian perspective.
Mr. Walsh’s reporting is not limited to Sudan. He spent seven years covering Pakistan and Afghanistan for The Guardian, during which time he lived just a few hours from where ‘Osama Bin Laden, the Al-Qaeda leader, was assassinated by American Navy SEALs’. His work had angered the Pakistani authorities so much that he was expelled from Pakistan for his reporting, and was also made to flee Egypt after a tip-off from an American official who warned The New York Times that he faced possible detention by Egyptian authorities following the publication of a sensitive article.
The New York Times were forced to contact Irish authorities upon realising that the Trump administration would delay providing assistance due to Mr. Walsh’s criticism of the American President and his attack on the press, with the Washington Post even writing an article stating that the Trump administration supposedly wanted to let it happen.
Mr. Walsh tells the University Observer of his time in Egypt and how ‘one of the frustrating things in Egypt, even though I was there for five years, was how Egypt made it clear that the penalties for speaking out in the media or even on social media for Egyptians were going to be so high. I mean, people were being arrested, sometimes tortured because of what they had written on Twitter or detained without charge for years on end.’
Mr. Walsh says that the central attraction of the job is having this privileged access to other people's lives and having an opportunity to experience these countries, to see people in their environment and ‘of course to report on them and to bring back to people in the rest of the world accounts of what's happening to them, particularly when it's in places where there is conflict or violence. Once you start traveling around in some of these countries, you realize that the core of what it means to really be a journalist, of course, is about meeting people.’
‘A very core impulse in a lot of us as people all around the world, as human beings, is that we want people to know what's happening to us. And even if it only holds out a faint hope that that will improve our immediate circumstances.’