Conflict in Sudan: genocide committed in Darfur, says HRW

Genocide may have been committed in the town of El Geneina in Western Darfur, in one of the worst atrocities of the year-long Sudanese civil war, according to a report published by Human Rights Watch (HRW).

It says the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces and their Arab allies have committed ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity against ethnic Massalit and non-Arab communities in the city.

The report calls for sanctions against those responsible for the atrocities, including RSF leader Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemedti.

The UN says some 15,000 people are feared killed in El Geneina last year.

Warning: This article contains details that some readers may find distressing.

The HRW report documents evidence of a systematic campaign by RSF and allied militias to expel Massalit residents from El Geneina.

Witnesses described how the RSF rounded up and shot men, women and children trying to escape ethnic violence in the restive city.

At least “thousands of people” were killed and “hundreds of thousands” left as refugees between April and November 2023, according to the 218-page report.

“These events are among the worst atrocities against civilians so far in the ongoing conflict in Sudan,” he added.

The BBC has spoken to people in El Geneina who say they have been victims of ethnic violence.

One man told us he had joined others who fled to a central gathering place after sites were attacked in different parts of the city. He said that the RSF had a base nearby and eventually began shelling this area, Mudaris, with heavy weapons.

“We buried all the dead at night,” he said, “one day 186 people, another day 80, another day 50.”

The man, who asked not to be identified, is now taking refuge in neighboring Chad.

He told the BBC that gunmen raped his wife, using degrading language as they did so: “They said: ‘We are your husband now, all your people have been killed. You can be our wives’ servants and clean our houses.’”

The HRW report says RSF fighters and militias used derogatory racial slurs against Massalit and other racial groups, telling them that the land was not theirs and would become “the land of the Arabs.”

It says the attacks culminated in a large-scale massacre on June 15 last year, when the RSF and its allies opened fire on a convoy of civilians desperately trying to flee.

A 17-year-old boy described to HRW the murder of 12 children and five adults from several families: “Two RSF forces… snatched the children from their parents and, when the parents began to scream, two other RSF forces RSF shot the children. parents, killing them. Then they rounded up the children and shot them. “They threw their bodies into the river and their belongings behind them.”

The current violence has arisen from a long history of tensions over resources between non-Arab farming communities, including the Masalit, and Arab pastoralist communities.

These tensions were taken advantage of by the previous government of Omar al Bashir. He created Arab militias known as Janjaweed to quell a Masalit rebellion in the 2000s, from which the RSF was eventually formed. Many of the people who fled Janjaweed attacks 20 years ago found refuge in internally displaced persons camps in El Geneina.

Sudan’s civil war has helped reignite ethnic violence. It began as a power struggle between Sudanese army leaders General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and RSF paramilitary General Hemedti, but has since drawn in other ethnic militias.

General Hemedti has denied that his fighters deliberately attacked civilians.

But HRW says he is among those with command responsibility over the forces that carried out the atrocities.

HRW researchers interviewed more than 220 Sudanese refugees in Chad, Uganda, Kenya and South Sudan, as well as remotely, between June 2023 and April 2024.

They also reviewed and analyzed more than 120 photographs and videos of the events, satellite images and documents shared by humanitarian organizations to corroborate accounts of abuses.

The human rights body called for further investigations to determine if there was an intention to eliminate the Massalit community, which would indicate genocide.

The United States and the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court have spoken of war crimes in Darfur but have not specifically mentioned genocide.

RSF says it is not involved in what it describes as a “tribal conflict” in Darfur.