Sudan: War between Khartoum rivals takes on an ethnic dimension in Darfur

Sudan: War between Khartoum rivals takes on an ethnic dimension in Darfur

In the west of the country, the fighting has turned into a conflict between the Janjaweed militias supported by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and non-Arab communities who have formed self-defense groups.

“There’s a smell of death in Geneina. We were being targeted even as we buried our dead,” said Rabih Saleh, a native of the West Darfur capital who has just taken refuge in the north of this western Sudanese province after two days in a minibus. On Sunday, June 11, ten rockets fell on his neighborhood of Shati, killing three civilians at the doorstep of his house. “When we got to the main traffic circle, we hid the children’s eyes so they wouldn’t see the piles of decomposing bodies. The smell was suffocating,” added the veterinarian employed by the Ministry of Agriculture.

The fighting that broke out in Khartoum on April 15 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) led by General Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Al-Bourhane and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of General Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, aka “Hemetti,” soon spilled over into Darfur, where the latter comes from. According to doctors and human rights activists, the death toll from the clashes in Geneina now stands at over 1,200, with several thousand injured. After losing control of the city’s strategic points, the airport and a military base, the SAF withdrew on April 24 to their headquarters seven kilometers from the center. The town’s population of almost 200,000 then found itself on the front line against the RSF and its allies.

To leave the town, Saleh had to bribe Arab militiamen, spending the equivalent of €90 for each member of his family. “You need a bit of money and, above all, not to be [from the non-Arab ethnic group] Masalit to have a chance of escaping,” added the family father (who comes from an Arab tribe himself). The war in West Darfur has taken an ethnic turn as the fighting quickly turned into a conflict between the Janjaweed Arab militias massively supported by the RSF and the so-called “African,” i.e. non-Arab communities such as the Masalit who have formed self-defense groups. The latter make up the majority of victims of the violence.

Governor arrested and executed

The 2003 Darfur war led to the displacement of almost half the Masalit of West Darfur to Chad. “From the 2000s onwards, Omar Al-Bashir installed a peace of victors there, giving power to Arab fiefdoms created from scratch by the Islamist regime,” explained Jérôme Tubiana, a researcher who is one of the region’s leading specialists, “after his fall in 2019 and the Juba agreements signed in 2020 between the government and rebel groups, these community leaders felt their gains threatened and helped plunge the region back into violence.”

“The local players pay little attention to the conflict at the national level. They are exploiting the conflict that broke out in Khartoum to wage their own war, or rather to continue the war they had already started. The Arab militias are taking advantage of the two belligerents to advance their land-grabbing campaign to dominate the state of West Darfur,” Tubiana continued.

Today, Geneina is under siege. The main market, administrative buildings and camps for displaced persons have been set on fire. Electricity networks have been cut since the end of May, making telephone communications impossible. Due to the fighting and the lack of medicine and electricity, all health centers are out of service.

Following a televised interview in which he accused the RSF and allied militias of perpetrating “genocide,” the Masalit governor of West Darfur, Khamis Abdallah Abakar was arrested on Wednesday, June 14, by Hemetti’s men. A few hours later, he was executed and his remains were mutilated. The death of this historic figure of the Darfur rebellion, who became governor after the signing of the Juba peace accords in 2020, was immediately blamed on the RSF, but the latter denied any involvement and blamed “outlaws” affiliated with the Islamist regime. “Everything seems to confirm the involvement of the RSF, although that doesn’t absolve the regular army of its responsibility to protect a high-ranking state official,” the journalist Fayez Al-Sulaik wrote in the columns of Sudans Post.

Ethnic and political targeting

As the fighting unfolds, many public figures are also being targeted by the RSF and its allies. The Darfur Bar Association deplored the assassinations of several of its members as well as journalists, doctors, political activists and traditional chiefs. The family of the Masalit sultan was decimated by a rocket fired by paramilitaries. “These incidents are ethnic and political targeting. They force their way into the homes of intellectuals. Their idea is to install an Arab nation here, to replace the Masalit, to appropriate land,” said a former employee of a French NGO who fled the town on Tuesday, June 13, with his computer, three books and some clothing.

When they’re not being massacred in the streets, civilians are being chased along the exile routes leading to neighboring Chad, where over 120,000 people have taken refuge in the space of two months. “There are checkpoints everywhere. The FSR or militiamen close to them stop you, ask what tribe you’re from, where you live, all sorts of details,” said Mohamed, who only gave his first name and arrived in Adré on Monday, “one wrong word and they execute you on the side of the road. It happened in front of me, they tied a man’s hands, whipped him and shot him in front of us before stripping us.”

To reach the Chadian border post from which we reported, columns of thousands of civilians cross on foot stretches of land that have been soaked by the first rains of the season. In some of the videos seen by Le Monde, groups of refugees, some carrying their children in their arms, are told to run by the Chadian soldiers welcoming them while Sudanese militiamen fire bullets around the border, the porous nature of which has raised fears of a spillover of the conflict.

Since the start of the war between the Khartoum warlords, over 270,000 of the nearly two million refugees have been from West Darfur. “Darfur is rapidly sinking into humanitarian calamity. The world cannot let this happen. Not again,” said Martin Griffiths, the UN’s head of humanitarian affairs, in reference to the war that claimed more than 300,000 lives 20 years ago.