“There is an odor of death in Al-Geneina. We were targeted even when we were burying our dead,” describes Dr. Rabih Saleh, originally from the capital of West Darfur and having just taken refuge in the north of this province in western Sudan, after two days in a minibus. On Sunday, June 11, ten rockets fell on his neighborhood of Shati, killing three civilians on the threshold of his house. “When we passed the main roundabout, we covered the children’s eyes so they wouldn’t see the piles of decomposing bodies. The smell was unbreathable, ”continues this veterinarian employed at the Ministry of Agriculture.
The fighting that erupted 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 alias “Hemetti”, n quickly spilled over into Darfur, the region of origin of the latter. The death toll from the clashes in Al-Geneina now stands at more than 1,200 dead and several thousand injured, according to doctors and human rights activists. After losing control of strategic points in the city, the airport and a military base, the FAS withdrew on April 24 to their headquarters, 7 kilometers from the center. The population (nearly 200,000 inhabitants) then found themselves on the front line against the FSR and their allies.
To leave the city, Rabih Saleh had to go through Arab militiamen, spending the equivalent of 90 euros for each member of his family. “You need a little money and, above all, not being [of the Masalit ethnic group] to have a chance of escaping,” concludes the father, who comes from an Arab tribe. The war in West Darfur has taken an ethnic turn. The fighting quickly turned into a conflict between the “janjawid” Arab militias, massively supported by the RSF, and the so-called “African” communities, that is to say non-Arabs – including the Masalit – who formed groups of self-defense. These constitute the majority of victims of violence.
Governor Arrested and Executed
The 2003 war in Darfur had already led to the displacement of almost half of the Masalit from West Darfur to Chad. “From the 2000s, Omar Al-Bashir had installed a peace of the victors there, giving power to Arab chiefdoms created from scratch by the Islamist regime, deciphers researcher Jérôme Tubiana, one of the best specialists in the region. . After its fall in 2019, then the Juba Accords signed in 2020 between the government and rebel groups, these community leaders felt their gains threatened and helped to plunge the region back into violence. »
“Local actors ignore the conflict at the national level. They instrumentalize the war 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 and their project of domination over the state of West Darfur,” continues Jérôme Tubiana.
Al-Geneina is now under siege. The main market, the administrations and the camps for the displaced were set on fire. Since the end of May, the electricity networks have been cut, making telephone communications impossible. Affected by the fighting and due to a lack of medicine or electricity, all the health centers are out of service.
Following a television 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 soldiers of General “Hemetti”. A few hours later, he was executed and his remains mutilated. The death of this historic figure of the Darfur rebellion, who became governor after the signing of the Juba peace accords in 2020, is attributed to the FSR. They have denied any involvement, blaming “outlaws” affiliated with the Islamist regime. “Everything confirms the involvement of the FSR. But that does not exonerate the regular army from its responsibility to protect a senior state official, ”laments journalist Fayez Al-Sulaik in the columns of the Sudans Post.
“Ethnic and political targeting”
Amid the fighting, many public figures were also targeted by the RSF and their allies. The Darfur Bar Association has deplored the killings of several of its members, journalists, doctors, political activists and traditional leaders. The family of the Masalit sultan was decimated by a rocket fired by the paramilitaries. “It’s ethnic and political targeting. They force the entrance to the houses of intellectuals. Their idea is to set up an Arab nation here, to replace the Masalit, to appropriate land”, protests a former collaborator of a French NGO who fled the city, Tuesday, June 13, with some clothes, his computer and three books.
When not massacred in the streets, civilians are hunted on the roads of exile leading to neighboring Chad, where more than 120,000 people have taken refuge in two months. “There are checkpoints everywhere. The FSR or the militiamen who are close to them stop you, ask what tribe you are from, where you live, full of details, says Mohamed, who arrived in Adré on Monday. One wrong word and they’ll 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 before our eyes before stripping us. »
To reach this Chadian border post, columns of thousands of civilians cross on foot stretches of land soaked by the first rains. In certain videos seen by Le Monde, groups of refugees, some carrying their children in their arms, are ordered to run by the Chadian soldiers who welcome them, while the bullets fired by the Sudanese militiamen resound around the border, whose porosity raises fears of an overflow of the conflict.
Since the beginning of the leaders’ war in Khartoum, out of nearly 2 million displaced people, more than 270,000 have been in West Darfur. “Darfur is rapidly descending into a humanitarian calamity. The world can’t let that happen. Not again,” warns Martin Griffiths, United Nations head of humanitarian affairs, referring to the war which, twenty years earlier, had claimed more than 300,000 lives.