By Tom Shacklock

For over one year, the people of Sudan have suffered from a war that has been largely ignored by the international community. The conflict started in April 2023 as a power struggle between military generals. However, it has also triggered a campaign of brutal violence and potential ethnic cleansing and genocide against the Masalit and other non-Arab communities of the western region of Darfur. This recent violence underscores that the causes of the Darfur Genocide of the 2000s have remained unaddressed.

Historical context

Sudan has faced several wars related to identity-based divisions since gaining independence from joint British and Egyptian rule in 1956. Political elites belonging to Sudan’s Arab population from the dominant northern region fomented conflict with Sudan’s black and Christian communities in the southern region. In both the First Civil War (1955-1972) and the Second Civil War (1983-2005), government policies fuelled conflict by seeking to entrench an ideology of Arab supremacy through policies of Islamization, “Arabization,” and cultural homogenization.

In the 1980s, the marginalized western region of Darfur faced desperate conditions related to drought, desertification, famine, and war between northern and southern Sudan. The collapse of law and order in Darfur created conditions for militias to gain prominence and fight for land and resources. Militias comprising members of the largely nomadic Arab communities became collectively known as the “Janjaweed,” which fought other non-Arab militias.

Omar al-Bashir, the dictator who oversaw the atrocities in Darfur in the 2000s, came to power in the capital Khartoum through a military coup in 1989. 

The Darfur Genocide (2003-2008)

From 2003 to 2008, a government-led campaign resulted in the deaths of approximately 300,000 civilians in Darfur from violence, disease, and starvation and the displacement of over two million others. In early 2003, two Darfuri rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), had launched a rebellion against the government over the marginalization of Darfur. In response, the government military and its allied Janjaweed militias systematically targeted and forcibly displaced the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa communities, attacking civilians, burning villages, destroying food sources, looting relief supplies, and using sexual violence as a weapon of war. 

While the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa communities are all culturally distinct, they are all majority Muslim communities. The Zaghawa are a semi-nomadic herder community, while the Fur and Masalit are largely sedentary agriculturalist communities. In this regard, the violence in Darfur has not fallen neatly along simplistic and historical “farmer-herder” divisions, and the “Arab-African” divide commonly applied to this crisis over-simplifies its various complexities. However, the Janjaweed’s atrocities arose from Arab supremacy intersecting with resource conflicts in a marginalized region.

Though the then United States (US) Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the Darfur atrocities constituted genocide, the United Nations (UN) International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur only recognized the atrocities as crimes against humanity. The UN Commission concluded that it could not establish genocidal intent in the actions of the Janjaweed and the Sudanese military. For example, it argued that the Janjaweed’s decision to avoid attacking villages with mixed populations suggested a lack of genocidal intent. The report also cited village attacks where the attackers only killed men they considered to be rebels and forcibly vacated the villages in the process as indication of a lack of genocidal intent. 

Scholars have criticized the UN Commission for overlooking various dimensions including the context of Arab supremacy, the possibility that actors can aim to destroy a community “in part,” and expressions reportedly used by the Janjaweed suggesting that their victims were racially inferior. Nevertheless, the Commission emphasized that its findings did not reduce the severity of the atrocities.

From revolution to renewed conflict

A joint peacekeeping force comprising troops from the African Union (AU) and the UN deployed to Darfur in 2007. While the violence declined by the late 2000s, the conflict continued, revolving around access to land and water and ethnic identity. Several years after the height of the Darfur Genocide and the end of the Second Civil War (1983-2005), the southern region of the country gained independence as South Sudan in 2011. The Janjaweed rebranded itself as the “Rapid Support Forces” (RSF) under General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (known as “Hemedti”) and was legally recognized as an independent security force in 2017. In 2018 and 2019, a popular uprising led to the overthrow of al-Bashir and brought about a transitional civilian-military power-sharing arrangement. These political changes also raised questions about whether al-Bashir would be sent to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for genocide. 

The UN-AU peacekeeping mission in Sudan formally ended in 2020. However, tensions between the parties to the power-sharing arrangement led to a military coup in 2021. Additional tensions developed between the RSF and the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) as the RSF opposed plans to be integrated into the SAF. Eventually, this power struggle culminated in the current conflict between the RSF and the SAF in April 2023, reigniting ethnic-based hostilities in Darfur. 

Genocide returns to Darfur?

Following over 50 days of RSF attacks on the Masalit population of the city of El Geneina, the bodies of at least 1,000 people were buried in mass graves in Al Ghabat cemetery from April to June 2023. Many of the victims had been killed with brutal methods, including being burnt alive. International media have been unable to corroborate certain survivors’ accounts of the violence, and a telecommunications blackout during much of the violence in El Geneina has made it difficult for reporters to obtain evidence of these attacks. Nevertheless, Reuters found that different survivors provided consistent accounts of attacks. According to a UN report, between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed in El Geneina last year.

There is growing evidence that the RSF has again targeted non-Arab communities, especially the Masalit, in what appears to be a campaign of ethnic cleansing or even genocide in Western Darfur. The RSF has been destroying homes, killing Masalit men, and subjecting Masalit women and girls to sexual violence. Survivors of rape have said that their attackers explicitly referred to their ethnic identity and expressed that their children would be Arab. There have also been accounts of the RSF asking about people’s identity and then killing them at roadblocks. These accounts suggest that the recent violence has been more targeted and one-sided and that the element of genocidal intent may be more explicit than in the 2000s. 

A recent report by Human Rights Watch, published on May 9, 2024, has documented a year of “ethnic cleansing” targeting the Masalit and other non-Arab communities, perpetrated by the RSF and allied militias, in and around El Geneina. There is now a risk of another large-scale massacre in the city of El Fasher, where hundreds of thousands of displaced civilians have fled. It is the last city in Darfur held by the SAF and is currently besieged by the RSF.

Beyond the direct violence, international agencies have warned of a major humanitarian crisis. Around nine million people have been displaced, and over half a million people have fled to Chad, where they are struggling to survive and feel abandoned. This sense of abandonment is reflected not only in the international community’s neglect of the crisis but also in the ways in which international actors have not taken the crisis seriously politically or diplomatically. From December 2023 to January 2024, RSF leader Hemedti was welcomed by various governments during a tour of Africa. Meanwhile, the United Arab Emirates has reportedly provided military and financial support to the RSF, while Egypt has reportedly supported the SAF militarily. Saudi Arabia is also said to be supporting the SAF while acting as a mediator for peace.

Conclusion

The complex combination of conflict drivers in Western Sudan will necessitate various solutions. Peaceful co-existence will depend on meaningful efforts, beyond short-term international intervention, to address the structural factors dividing communities affected by deprivation and marginalization. Furthermore, it will be essential that peace and justice measures confront the ideology of Arab supremacy in Sudan at a sociopolitical level and address the victimization of non-Arab communities including the Masalit.