When fighting erupted in Khartoum four months ago, the immediate horror at its impact on civilians was shadowed by a still greater fear – that the conflict between two warring generals might swiftly spread through the rest of Sudan, causing still more suffering, destabilising neighbours and, in particular, sparking fresh ethnic violence in Darfur.
Those fears swiftly came to pass: “We are not on the precipice of a human catastrophe, we are in the midst of one,” the international criminal court’s prosecutor, Karim Khan KC, warned last month.
The crimes which made the region synonymous with genocide two decades ago – mass killings, widespread sexual violence, the torching of villages and neighbourhoods – have returned to West Darfur. Human rights groups say both the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitaries battling the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and allied Arab militias are preying on members of the Masalit minority. The perpetrators are not merely callously indifferent to the suffering of civilians, as in Khartoum; they are actively targeting them. In June, the governor of West Darfur, Khamis Abdallah Abbakar, was murdered in the region’s capital, El Geneina, just after he publicly criticised the RSF. Within hours, hundreds of adults and children were massacred as they attempted to flee the city: “The dead became uncountable,” one humanitarian worker told CNN.
The broader conflict is rooted in Darfur’s descent into genocidal violence in 2003. After rebel groups angered by the marginalisation of the non-Arab population took up arms, the dictator Omar al-Bashir sought to terrorise the region into compliance by outsourcing ethnic cleansing to the Janjaweed militia. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, rose through the ranks and then oversaw the regularisation of the fighters into the RSF. When revolution swept through Sudan in 2019, Hemedti and General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, commander of the SAF, agreed to a transition to civilian authority. But they subsequently turned on the civilian leaders – and then on each other.
What is happening in West Darfur is not so much part of this wider war as enabled by it. Unlike the violence of two decades ago, in which an estimated 300,000 died, this cycle is taking place under a less clear chain of command. Underlying tensions between sedentary non-Arab populations and Arab tribes and militias seeking their land were never resolved. They were sharpened by climate change, and have now reignited. RSF fighters are increasingly turning to the spoils of war, increasing their ruthlessness. It is now clear that the withdrawal of Unamid peacekeepers from Darfur in 2021, at a time of such uncertainty for Sudan, was a grave mistake, despite the mission’s limitations.
Increased support for the more than 1 million people who have fled Sudan, including from Darfur, is critical, and so is pushing for humanitarian access to the 3.5 million displaced internally. Mr Khan has rightly announced that he is investigating crimes in the region and it is essential to expose and document them. But accountability, if it ever comes, will be painfully slow. The first domestic or international trial for atrocities in the region – against the Janjaweed leader Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-al-Rahman – began only last year. The broader conflict is being fuelled and sustained by Gulf states and Egypt. Other governments must press them to pull back. But that, too, is unlikely to bring rapid relief to populations now being terrorised.
