Hunger Is Not A Side Effect Of War. The Law Already Calls It A Weapon.

A year after El Fasher, the world has the evidence, the statutes and the court. What it lacks is the will to use them..

Feature Article Hunger Is Not A Side Effect Of War. The Law Already Calls It A Weapon.

WED, 28 OCT 2026

On 26 October 2025, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) took El Fasher in Sudan's Darfur region. The city had been under siege since May 2024. The UN Human Rights Office later documented more than 6,000 killings in the first three days of the final offensive and said the real toll was almost certainly higher.

That date is easy to remember as the day a city fell. I want to ask about the 18 months before it, when the city was starved.

Amnesty International reported that the RSF restricted the entry of food and humanitarian supplies, shelled the city almost daily, and reduced people to eating ambaz, a by-product of peanut oil normally fed to animals.

Nobody can call that an accident of war. A UN fact-finding mission described an 18-month siege that deliberately imposed conditions of life through the deprivation of food, water, medical care, and humanitarian assistance. The mission found the hallmarks of genocide against the Zaghawa and Fur communities. Human Rights Watch reports that the UN mission also concluded that the RSF and allied forces used starvation as a method of warfare, which is a war crime.

I am a Ghanaian writer and UN Online Volunteer. I write this column from Accra, thousands of kilometres from Darfur. Distance is no excuse here because the rules I am about to describe were written for everyone, including people who will never see a famine.

What the Law Already Says

Most readers are told that the collapse of international humanitarian law means the law has failed. I disagree. The law is clear, and the failure lies in enforcement.

Three instruments matter most.
First, Article 54 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions prohibits starving civilians as a method of warfare. It also forbids attacking, destroying, or removing the things civilians need to survive, such as food supplies, farmland, crops, livestock, and drinking water. Relief must also be allowed through, with the agreement of the parties (Article 70). The same prohibition applies in civil wars through Article 14 of Additional Protocol II and customary international law. This matters because Sudan's war is an internal one.

Second, Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) of the Rome Statute makes it a war crime to intentionally use starvation of civilians as a method of warfare by depriving them of objects indispensable to their survival. The article expressly includes wilfully impeding relief supplies as provided for under the Geneva Conventions.

Third, Security Council Resolution 2417 (2018). It was adopted unanimously, and the Council, for the first time, drew an explicit link between armed conflict and hunger. The voting record shows that China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States all voted in favour. The five most powerful governments on earth put their names to a text condemning starvation as a weapon. That is why I do not accept that the law is unclear or contested. It is the most widely endorsed rule in this field.

Sudan: The Evidence

Sudan is a case where several credible bodies, working independently, have reached overlapping conclusions.

The siege. Estimates suggest that more than 260,000 civilians were trapped in El Fasher during the final months.

The killing. The UN Human Rights Office found that the RSF's conduct amounts to war crimes and possible crimes against humanity. Amnesty International concluded that the RSF committed crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing.

The obstruction goes beyond one side. Human Rights Watch says the warring parties continue to wilfully obstruct aid movements and attack humanitarian workers. That includes the Sudanese Armed Forces, which have also been accused of restricting aid into areas controlled by the RSF. I name both because accountability that picks a side is not accountability.

The situation now. On 13 October 2026, the IPC issued an alert that famine risk is rising across Greater Darfur and Greater Kordofan. The alert stated that Sudan's 2026 Humanitarian Response Plan faces a 57 per cent funding gap. Recently, the US, the EU, the UK, and about 30 other governments warned that an estimated 19.5 million people, representing 41 per cent of the population, face high levels of acute food insecurity. They called on the parties to open all routes across front lines and borders, including air access into Darfur.

The court. The ICC has an established record in Darfur. In October 2025, it convicted Janjaweed leader Ali Kushayb on 27 counts, the first conviction arising from the Darfur situation, and in December sentenced him to 20 years in prison. However, those crimes date back to 2003 and 2004. For the current war, the Deputy Prosecutor told the Security Council in January 2026 that the RSF oversaw an organised, calculated campaign of atrocities in El Fasher. In July, she stated that investigators hold linkage evidence tying RSF leadership to specific crimes. The Security Council's sanctions committee listed four RSF commanders on 24 February 2026. Yet reporting suggests that no public warrant application has been filed for post-2023 crimes, although the Office says applications can be kept under seal.

A year on, the world has a conviction for crimes committed twenty years ago and no public warrant for the siege it watched unfold in real time.

Gaza: The Evidence

Gaza is the more politically charged case, so I will stay with what courts and monitoring bodies have found, and what they have not.

On 21 November 2024, ICC judges issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant. They found reasonable grounds to believe that each bears criminal responsibility for the war crime of starvation as a method of warfare and for the crimes against humanity of murder, persecution, and other inhumane acts.

Israel rejects the charges. A warrant is an allegation to be tested at trial, not a conviction, and both men are presumed innocent. That presumption is the same one I want applied to every commander in Sudan.

On 22 August 2025, the IPC confirmed famine in Gaza Governorate. More than 500,000 people faced catastrophic hunger, marking the first time the designation had been applied to the territory.

What happened next is the part I find most instructive. After the ceasefire of 10 October 2025, the IPC reported that no area of Gaza was classified as being in famine, crediting improved humanitarian and commercial access. Even so, at least 1.6 million people, representing 77 per cent of the population, still faced high levels of acute food insecurity.

Hunger there eased when access improved. That is difficult to reconcile with the idea that starvation in war simply happens. It behaves like a policy variable that responds to decisions.

The situation is again deteriorating. On 19 October 2026, the World Food Programme announced that it must cut food assistance in Gaza by about one-third because of funding shortages, leaving half a million people without critical support.

The same law also protects Israeli civilians and hostages taken on 7 October 2023. A reading of humanitarian law that applies only to one side's victims is not law; it is politics.

The Strongest Objections

An evidence-based column should answer its critics, so here are the strongest arguments against my position.

"Hunger in war has many causes."
This is true. In Sudan, drought linked to El Niño and funding gaps worsen the picture. In Gaza, destroyed infrastructure and collapsed livelihoods matter. Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) does not criminalise hunger. It criminalises intentionally using starvation of civilians as a method of warfare. Proving intent is difficult and belongs in a courtroom, not an opinion column. That is exactly why prosecutorial work matters.

"Israel disputes the charges and the court's jurisdiction."

It does. Israel is not a party to the Rome Statute and argues that the court lacks jurisdiction. The court's judges rejected those challenges, and the question can proceed through the court's own procedures. A state confident in its position has every reason to present its case there.

"The ICC is selective and cannot enforce its decisions."

This criticism has merit. The court has no police force, and states have ignored its warrants. Still, an imperfect court capable of issuing real warrants is better than no court at all. The honest response to selectivity is to push the Office of the Prosecutor to act consistently across all situations, which is exactly what I am advocating.

"Humanitarian corridors can be abused."

That is a legitimate military concern. It is why corridors must be negotiated with the consent of the parties, monitored, and operated by neutral bodies. That is precisely what I am arguing for.

Why This Belongs in a Ghanaian Newspaper

Ghana ratified the Rome Statute in 1999. We have also sent peacekeepers to some of the world's most troubled conflicts. Our readers include families with relatives in Sudan, Libya, and the Sahel, as well as members of the Ghanaian diaspora across the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, and Germany.

The African Union's Constitutive Act, in Article 4(h), recognises the right of the Union to intervene in a member state in grave circumstances, namely war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity.

The AU wrote that principle itself. It has no excuse for treating a famine on its own continent as someone else's emergency.

What I Am Doing About It, and What I Am Not

I am not going to lead convoys into a war zone, and I will not pretend that a columnist can negotiate a ceasefire. Real humanitarian corridors are agreed upon by the parties and operated by the UN, the Red Cross, and trained humanitarian organisations. Anyone who claims otherwise is risking lives for a headline.

What I can do is more limited, and I believe more useful:

Document responsibly. I will compile and publish only verified open-source material, using established standards such as the Berkeley Protocol on Digital Open-Source Investigations. I will work with accredited partners rather than freelance in the field.
Press for access, lawfully. I will advocate for humanitarian corridors that are consent-based, neutral, and monitored, in accordance with Article 70 of Additional Protocol I.
Push for accountability through the proper channels. That means the ICC, the Security Council, and the African Union, using the Rome Statute as written.

To carry this work beyond a weekly column, I am building a documentation and advocacy desk within Brownsy Silva Company. It will publish evidence summaries in plain language, explain what each treaty requires, and partner with legal professionals capable of advancing cases.

Navi Pillay is an example of the approach I am trying to learn from. She moved from the bench of the Rwanda Tribunal, where the Akayesu judgment recognised rape as an act of genocide, to leading the UN human rights office. Her career demonstrates that credibility comes from combining evidence, law, and institutions. I do not claim her stature, only her method.

My Call to Action

To the Prosecutor and Deputy Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court: You told the Security Council in January and again in July that you hold evidence concerning El Fasher. Act on it, publicly and lawfully. Bring forward the applications concerning the siege and its use of starvation, and treat Sudan and Palestine according to the same standard of evidence and urgency. Victims cannot be expected to wait indefinitely for a sealed filing.

To the African Union Peace and Security Council: Convene on Sudan's famine risk now. Press both the Sudanese Army and the RSF to open cross-line and cross-border routes, including air access into Darfur. Back the court's work with practical cooperation. Article 4(h) is yours to use.

To the Security Council's Five Permanent Members: You unanimously condemned starvation as a weapon in 2018. Demonstrate that the vote meant something, and stop shielding allies from the standard you helped create.

A Closing Note From Me

I know opinion columns are often read once and forgotten. I would like this one to be different, so here is what I ask you to do.

Read Article 8(2)(b)(xxv) for yourself and examine the sources I have used. Then ask your MP, your church, your university, and your newsroom what they are doing about it.

Hunger as a weapon only works when the world is willing to look away.

We have the evidence. We have the treaties. What remains is whether we will act, and that part depends on people like us.

Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian writer from Kumasi, Ashanti Region. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a public health advocate whose work focuses on environmental health, health security and current affairs, with emphasis on the health impacts of illegal mining,. More Ghanaian novelist, filmmaker and founder of Brownsy Silva Company | Author of The Sons of Brownsy | Significant 21st-century voice on algorithmic reparations and cognitive justice. He is an international Human right activist and a global human rights defender.

*Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Public Health Advocate and Columnist focused on environmental health and health security. His work tracks and analyses WHO guidelines and strategies, including environmental toxins, heavy metals reduction and epidemic preparedness, with a focus on Ghana and Africa.*

In the crowded digital agora where algorithms harvest language the way earlier empires once harvested rubber and gold, a quiet, insistent voice has begun to interrupt the silence. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams, a Ghanaian novelist, columnist, and filmmaker working from Accra under the banner of Brownsy Silva Company, has spent recent seasons arguing that the great language models reshaping global life were trained, in part, on the unpaid creative labour, speech patterns, and cultural output of the Global South. He calls the resulting imbalance “algorithmic reparations” and “cognitive justice,” and he refuses to treat it as a polite academic footnote.

Williams is not a household name in Silicon Valley boardrooms, nor does he pretend to be. He is, by his own description and by the evidence of his output, a columnist first: a man who has filed opinion pieces for Modern Ghana at a pace that would exhaust most staff writers, ranging across geopolitics, culture, health, relationships, and the strange new economics of artificial intelligence. Beneath the journalism sits a larger architectural project. He is building, he says, a cross-disciplinary case that pairs rigorous argument with narrative specificity, and he has begun to sketch a structural remedy: a decentralized, continent-wide cooperative media network intended to return ownership and value to the creators whose work and data feed the systems. The proposal is deliberately ambitious. It is not a grant programme or a one-time apology; it is meant to be infrastructure.

Born and raised in Ghana, Williams came to storytelling early. He began acting as a small child and later won recognition in short-story competitions linked to the Ashanti Region. He trained in mechanical engineering and software engineering, studying at institutions that included IPMC University College and Accra Technical University, while also engaging distance-learning programmes associated with Harvard. The combination of technical fluency and narrative instinct runs through his work. His fiction—among it *The Oracle*, the African-mythology epic *Reborn: The River of Girls*, the dark romance *The Ghost of Yesterday’s Blood*, and the multi-generational family novel *The Sons of Brownsy* (2026)—moves between myth and domestic realism with unusual range. *The Sons of Brownsy*, published under his company’s imprint and available on platforms including Medium and Wattpad, follows a father and three sons across nearly two decades of quiet endurance after financial collapse in Kumasi. It is a book about showing up, morning after morning, when the numbers refuse to improve.

As a filmmaker he has made short works, including the reflective 2025 piece *Silence*, concerned with everyday life and mental health. Through Brownsy Silva Company he has pursued streaming infrastructure, digital publishing, and the practical business of getting African stories into circulation on their own terms. Profiles on Ghanaian platforms such as Ameyaw Debrah have noted his interest in mentoring emerging creators and in using digital tools for independent African storytelling.

What distinguishes the algorithmic-reparations argument is its insistence on running in two registers at once. Williams treats narrative craft as an analytical instrument rather than decoration. Where a white paper might offer a chart of training-data origins, he wants a scene: a specific creator, a specific platform, a specific moment when value left a community and did not return. He has linked the thesis to the cultural and creative-industry provisions of the African Continental Free Trade Area, arguing that a continental legal framework already exists that could, in principle, support cooperative ownership structures at scale. Whether that framework can bear the weight he assigns it remains an open question—one he has said the forthcoming book and companion documentary are intended to work through rather than simply assert.

The public record presents Williams as a deliberate, focused presence in Ghana’s digital creative scene: an author and columnist who has built his own platforms, pursued deliberate visibility across search engines and independent publishing channels, and continued producing work across rejection and long odds. Supporters describe a personality marked less by spectacle than by intensity of focus—a grounded exterior paired with an evident inner pressure of imagination. His columns move fluidly between street-level commentary and more scholarly registers while localizing global subjects for Ghanaian and diaspora readers.

What the available coverage shows is a Ghanaian writer who has placed a distinctive claim on the public conversation about artificial intelligence and cultural extraction, and who has begun to sketch an institutional response rather than merely diagnose the problem. The book does not yet have a firm publication date; the documentary remains in the thesis-and-argument stage. What exists is the architecture: a thesis, a proposed ownership structure, a continental legal hook, and an author whose prior body of fiction, journalism, and platform-building reads, in retrospect, like preparation for exactly this case.

Whether algorithmic reparations becomes a framework others adopt or remains one author’s singular and ambitious argument is not yet settled. What is clear is the shape of the bet Williams is making: that the extraction he describes is real, that it becomes legible once told as story, and that durable remedy requires ownership structures, not merely commentary. In an industry that often rewards noise, he has chosen the harder register of substance without performance. The ledger, he insists, remains open.Column: Tutu Baffour Brownsy Williams

Disclaimer: "The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect ModernGhana official position. ModernGhana will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements in the contributions or columns here." Follow our WhatsApp channel for meaningful stories picked for your day.

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