Destruction of Sudan’s rebels in El Fasher ‘bears the stamp of genocide’: UN experts

A “campaign of destruction” in October carried out by the Sudanese army against non-Arab communities and near a town in western Darfur shows “signs of genocide,” UN-backed human rights experts say, a dramatic outcome of the country’s devastating war.

The military called the Rapid Support Forces – known as the RSF and fighting the Sudanese army – killed many people and other atrocities in the city of El Fasher after an 18-month siege in which they imposed conditions “calculated to bring about the physical destruction” of non-Arab communities, especially the communities of Zaghawa and Fur, an independent mission to find the truth in Sudan.

UN officials say several thousand people were killed when the RSF took over El Fasher, the only remaining Sudanese military base in Darfur. Only 40 percent of the city’s 260,000 residents managed to escape the attack alive, with thousands injured, officials said. The fate of others is still unknown.

Sudan plunged into conflict in mid-April 2023, when a long-running conflict between its military leaders and the military erupted in the capital Khartoum and spread to other regions, including Darfur. So far, the war has killed more than 40,000 people, according to UN figures, but aid agencies say that is an underestimate and the true number could be many times higher.

The RSF conquered El Fasher last October and attacked the entire city with widespread violence that included mass killings, sexual violence, torture and kidnapping for ransom, according to the UN Human Rights Office.

They killed more than 6,000 people between October 25 and October 27, the office said. Prior to the attack, militants rampaged through the Abu Shouk camp, just outside El Fasher, killing at least 300 people in two days, the statement said.

RSF did not respond to an emailed request for comment. The commander of this group, Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, has admitted to being tortured by his soldiers, but disputed the extent of the atrocities.

At least 3 criteria for genocide are met

The report revealed a systematic pattern of ethnically targeted killings, sexual violence and destruction as well as public statements clearly calling for the elimination of non-Arab communities.

An international convention known collectively as the “Genocide Convention” – adopted in 1948, three years after the end of World War II and the Holocaust – sets out five criteria for assessing whether genocide has occurred. It includes killing or seriously injuring members of the group, preventing births or forcibly transferring children to the group, and taking steps to bring about the “physical destruction” of the group.

The fact-finding team said it found at least three of those five were encountered in the RSF’s actions: Killing members of a protected tribe; causes serious physical and mental harm; and deliberately introducing living conditions calculated to bring about the total or partial destruction of the group.

Under the convention, a decision on genocide could be made even if only one in five was met. The UN says that the decision to kill people must be made by an international court.

The excesses of the war are ‘not random’, the team said

The head of the fact-finding team, Mohamed Chande Othman, a former chief justice of Tanzania, said that the RSF’s operation was not a “random war” but a planned and organized campaign that had elements of genocide.

The residents of El Fasher were “physically exhausted, malnourished, and partially unable to escape, leaving them unable to defend themselves against the extreme violence that followed,” the team’s report said. “Thousands of people, especially the Zaghawa, were killed, raped or disappeared during three days of great terror.”

The report documented the cases of survivors who quoted RSF fighters as saying things like, “Is there any Zaghawa among you? If we find Zaghawa, we will kill them all” and “We want to eliminate anything black in Darfur.”

It also pointed to the “special targeting” of women and girls in Zaghawa and Fur, “whereas women considered Arabs tended to survive.”

Mona Rishmawi, a member of the fact-finding team, told a press conference in Geneva on Thursday that the team’s conclusion was based on evidence of mass killings, ethnic identification methods and statements by the perpetrators who expressed their intention to exterminate and destroy the targeted communities.

“If you prevent people from food … drinking water and medical care and you prevent them from helping people,” he said. “What do you want? You want to destroy them. You want to kill them.”

“We have reached the point of genocide now,” Rishmawi told reporters, adding that his team expects Sudan’s warring parties to get the message that “enough is enough.”

At a UN Security Council meeting in Sudan later Thursday, UN political chief Rosemary DiCarlo said the “horrific events” in El Fasher “could have been prevented.”

While El Fasher was under siege, he said UN human rights chief Volker Türk warned repeatedly of the risk of mass atrocities, “but the warnings were not heeded.”

Türk has now also warned the world community about similar crimes that could happen in the Sudan region, Kordofan, where the army and the RSF are fighting, said DiCarlo, urging action now to prevent the repetition of atrocities.

British Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper called the report’s findings “truly appalling” and took it to the Security Council, saying she wanted to “make sure the voices of Sudanese women who have endured so much are heard in the world.”

“Today’s report describes things that are unimaginable and shocking,” he said, citing the case of a woman who was asked by an RSF soldier how far along she was in her pregnancy. “When he was responding for seven months, he was shot seven times in the stomach and died,” Cooper told the council.

“This is the worst humanitarian crisis of the 21st century, a war that has left 33 million people in need of aid, 14 million people forced to flee their homes, starvation and millions of malnourished children,” said Cooper.

“The world is still failing the people of Sudan.”

Ask for accountability

The fact-finding panel was established in 2023 by the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, the UN’s leading human rights body, with 47 countries.

The delegation called for the perpetrators to be held accountable and warned that the protection of civilians is needed “more than ever” because the conflict is spreading to other regions in Sudan.

During the conflict, the warring parties were accused of violating international law. But most of that brutality was blamed on the RSF: The Biden administration, in one of its last statements, said the military had committed a massacre in Darfur.

WATCH | Just weeks after the RSF captured El Fasher, tens of thousands fled the escalating violence:

Aid groups in Sudan are struggling to care for the thousands who fled El Fasher

Almost three weeks after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces captured El Fasher, the news is still being blacked out. The UN estimates that 90,000 people have fled and many more are believed to be trapped as aid groups struggle to gain access and appeals from the United Nations for funding fall short of what they say is an urgent need for aid.

UN experts and rights groups say the RSF has been supported by the United Arab Emirates during the war, allegations the UAE has denied.

The RSF grew out of the Janjaweed groups, notorious for their brutality in the early 2000s in a brutal campaign in Darfur that killed some 300,000 people and drove 2.7 million from their homes. The former democratic ruler of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir, is still wanted by the International Court of Human Rights and other crimes committed during that time.