Attachments
By Akshaya Kumar and Omer Ismail June 2014
Introduction
One decade after Darfur’s Janjaweed militiamen earned global infamy as “devils on horseback,” Sudan is experiencing brutal violence at their hands once again. The first six months of 2014 have brought devastating death and destruction on par with any time in recent memory, including the period from 2003 to 2005, which is widely considered the height of the genocide in Darfur. Even Ali al-Za’tari—the usually reserved U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Sudan—is sounding the alarm. Za’tari recently warned, “If instability and increasing want continue without adequate mitigation, [Sudan] will be looking at unprecedented numbers of people in total crises and need in the rest of the year.”
The U.N. Security Council mandated that the Sudanese government disarm its Janjaweed militias a decade ago. This never happened. Now, many of those same men are moving across the country on government command, burning civilian areas to the ground, raping women, and displacing non-Arab civilians from their homes. The joint African Union-U.N. special representative for Darfur, Mohamed Ibn Chambas, has said that this “new wave of displacements and deliberate emptying of certain areas” bear eerie similarities to the situation in the region in 2003. Unlike the Janjaweed fighters from the past, however, Sudan is not keeping the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) at arm’s length. Instead, these fighters boast full government backing and formal immunity from prosecution due to their new status as members of the National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS).
With the advent of the RSF, the Sudanese government’s continued support of Janjaweed groups has become much more clear. After spending years trying to distance themselves from these forces of terror, the regime is not even bothering to deny their association with these war criminals anymore.In fact, Sudanese diplomats have thrown their political capital behind the group and boast that they successfully blocked the U.N. Security Council from issuing a statement criticizing the RSF. This report—the product of nine months of Enough Project research and wide consultation—traces the RSF’s movements across Sudan and exposes the civilian targeting that has become the hallmark of their activities. By connecting the Sudanese government’s own public statements embracing the RSF with evidence from affected communities on the ground, this report lays out the case for the individual criminal responsibility of high-level Sudanese government officials for both the war crimes and crimes against humanity perpetrated by the RSF.
Notably, these forces have not restricted their crimes against humanity to South Kordofan and Darfur. In fact, their first act was to lethally suppress peaceful protesters during the September 2013 demonstrations in Khartoum. As of late June 2014, RSF troops were still encircling the capital city. Adding a transnational dimension to their impact, these revitalized Janjaweed fighters have also been linked to regional criminal looting and poaching networks in the Central African Republic and the eastern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Janjaweed emerged in the period between 2003 and 2005 as a sub-regional problem within Sudan’s Darfur region. They now threaten both peace and stability in an arc extending across the Sahel and Central Africa.