Sudan and Arabs butchering Africans in Darfur: UN Denounces Indifference
Kanako Mita and Noriko Watanabe
Modern Tokyo Times
The United Nations (UN) recently released a report that claimed up to 15,000 Africans were butchered in a single city in West Darfur last year. This crime was committed by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied Arab militias in the region of El Geneina.
Similar to other massacres by Arab Muslims in this part of Sudan in recent history, the African Masalits were singled out and butchered.
The UN report stated, “The attacks were planned, coordinated, and executed by RSF and their allied Arab militias.”
The report continued by stating the ethnic nature of the massacres in El Geneina. Accordingly, the findings said: “Young men were particularly targeted and interrogated about their ethnicity. If identified as Masalit, many were summarily executed with a shot to the head. Women were physically and sexually assaulted. Indiscriminate shootings also injured and killed women and children.”
The Guardian reports, “The violence in El Geneina and Ardamata has drawn parallels with the genocide of the mid-2000s, when Kalashnikov-wielding Arab militias called the Janjaweed crushed a rebellion by African groups in Darfur, killing an estimated 300,000. The RSF emerged out of the Janjaweed.”
Volker Türk (the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights) said, “The crisis in Sudan is a tragedy that appears to have slipped into the fog of global amnesia.”
He highlighted that not only were drones, fighter jets, tanks, and other heavy weapons being waged by armed combatants – but sexual violence was part of the other war being waged to control power.
Volker Türk said, “Sexual violence as a weapon of war, including rape, has been a defining and despicable characteristic of this crisis since the beginning.”
Voice of America reports, “Turk presented a blistering and bleak assessment of life in Sudan since rival generals of the Sudanese Armed Forces and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces plunged the country into “a ruthless, senseless conflict” on April 15.”
The majority of documented cases of rape and other forms of sexual violence were done by the RSF -according to the UN.
He continued, “These figures are sadly a vast underrepresentation of the reality. Men in RSF uniform and armed men affiliated with the RSF were reported to be responsible for 81% of the documented incidents.”
AP News reports, “The 10 months of clashes between the Sudanese military, led by Gen. Abdel Fattah Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces, a powerful paramilitary group commanded by Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, has decimated vast swaths of the northeastern African country.”
Catherine Russell (Executive Director of UNICEF) said, “Sudan – and Darfur in particular – has become a living hell for millions of children, with thousands being ethnically targeted, killed, injured, abused, and exploited. This must end.”
Josep Borrell (the European Union’s chief diplomat) said, “These latest atrocities are seemingly part of a wide ethnic-cleansing campaign conducted by the RSF with the aim to eradicate the non-Arab Masalit community from West Darfur.”
Henceforth, the European Union is concerned for the non-Arab Masalits and other African ethnic groups in Darfur who face “another genocide” by Arab militias and remnants of the RSF.
The situation across many parts of Sudan is dire concerning internal displacement, the economy, and the fragile health care system being overwhelmed.
Lee Jay Walker says, “It is often forgotten that Arabs in the land of Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia only stopped slavery in the 1960s. Accordingly, with ISIS enslaving Yazidis in modern times in Iraq, it wasn’t surprising that Arabs also continued to enslave in Sudan during the war against the mainly African Animists and Christians in the south – which led to the creation of South Sudan. Therefore, even black African Muslims in Sudan can’t escape the bloodletting and the slavery legacy of Arabs in Sudan that is continuing today in Darfur.”
The original crisis was heavily focused on Khartoum. However, the ongoing economic, political, military, and ethnic convulsions are now being felt throughout various parts of Sudan.
Peace talks in the past have failed. Also, outside nations in the Gulf region and regionally are being accused of taking sides in the ongoing conflict in Sudan.
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