Guadi Calvo
While the civil war is still raging in Sudan and the cease-fire agreements established in the negotiations in the Saudi city of Jeddah, monitored by Riyadh and Washington, are systematically failing, reports are increasing of episodes of ethnic cleansing being practiced by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in the Darfur region.
These paramilitary forces are led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, alias Hemetti, an old warlord elevated to the rank of general by the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir. Beyond the tough confrontations in Khartoum with the regular Sudanese army, he has concentrated much of his efforts to assert himself in Darfur.
Hemetti, a native of that region like a large number of his troops, has not forgotten his unfinished business since 2003, when, under the pretext of putting an end to the separatist group Haraka Tahrir Sudan (Sudan Liberation Movement), which had attacked the Darfur region in April 2003, which had attacked in April 2003 the airport of El Fasher, in the capital of Shamal Darfur (north), one of the five states of the region, launched a campaign of extermination against the black ethnic groups or Masalists, a group of tribes, Nilo-Saharan (Christian and animist) farmers.
The operation ended with the death of more than half a million Masalists, a massacre perpetrated by the Janjaweed (armed horsemen), camel drivers, then led by Hemetti together with the Baggaras, an ethnically Arab community of Muslim faith, which would end up forming the seed of today’s rapid forces. The genocide in Darfur has remained unpunished since then, despite the fact that those most responsible for it have been identified and proven to have committed countless war crimes such as extrajudicial executions, kidnappings, torture, mass rape of women and girls, forced displacement of the civilian population -which exceeded two million people and included the use of chemical weapons- which today can so easily be repeated in exactly the same way as the crime of 20 years ago.
Although the civil war is being fought mainly in Khartoum, the country’s capital, today in fact a ghost town after having become the epicenter of the fighting. Entire neighborhoods have been looted and then razed to the ground, destroying most of the hospitals and supply centers, so that the population that has not been able to escape from the capital has no way of obtaining basic goods, drinking water, electricity, internet, banks, classes in schools and universities.And the entire public administration, which could have brought even minimal order to the chaos, has disappeared.
In the battle for Khartoum, it seems that the RSF are beginning to prevail over the regular Sudanese army, commanded by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, which has not been able to gain a greater advantage despite the fact that it has aviation, which the paramilitaries completely lack, and which is widely imposed with their ground forces.
Since the beginning of the current conflict, last April 15, between the Rapid Support Forces and the Sudanese armed forces commanded by General al-Burhan, the operations against the black civilian population of Darfur have not stopped, and new crimes against the civilian population have been constantly reported, again at the hands of the same vectors, who have changed their name but not their methods.Last June 15, the governor of Ghard Darfur (West), Khamis Abdullah Abakar, was assassinated by RSF paramilitaries, which has precipitated further violence against the civilian population.Governor Abakar was executed after giving a television interview in which he alleged that the RSF had killed hundreds of ordinary citizens in the region.Abakar was abducted in El-Geneina, the state capital, and later found dead.The murdered governor had a high standing in society, having once fought against the Janjaweed and saved the lives of hundreds of Masalit, which cost him imprisonment and exile.
The assassination of Abakar caused greater concern among the population of the regional capital, which has taken to the roads seeking refuge in neighboring Chad, whose border is less than 30 kilometers from El-Geneina, where refugees already exceed 300,000 and new contingents continue to join every day. Meanwhile, as many others have reached the border with Egypt as well as South Sudan and Ethiopia, where Sudanese refugees are believed to number around one million in bordering countries, while internally displaced persons have reached three million.
Beyond Khartoum and Darfur, another of the main centers of conflict is located in the central Kordofan region, between Darfur and the Nile Valley, where the RSF attacked the town of El-Obeid, the capital of North Kordofan, where a key oil refinery is located in addition to the transit of the pipeline that transports oil from Sudan and South Sudan.The regional force of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, composed mainly of members of the Nuba ethnic group, led by Abdulaziz al-Hilu, is taking advantage of the conflict to position itself with its strength and expand the Nubian cause to South Kordofan, capturing positions abandoned by the army in the framework of the priorities demanded by the civil war.
While the negotiations in Jeddah are failing, the African Union (AU) countries do not seem to know how to intervene and while the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) – the regional bloc of the Horn of Africa – cannot find a way to mediate, last Friday the official request of the Sudanese Sovereign Council – meaning the force of General a-Burhan who is in fact president of the country – through Vice-President Malik Agar, for Russian collaboration to cooperate in the resolution of the conflict was made known.
Angar stated in a press conference during his visit to Moscow, “We have asked for Russia’s help to put an end to the war in Sudan and informed the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, about a road map for the solution of the crisis”.
Beyond the cooperation of President Vladimir Putin’s government, it must be understood that other regional factors are at play in the Sudanese conflict, as is the case of Egypt, which is openly supporting General al-Burhan, while the United Arab Emirates (UAE), together with the Libyan force controlled by General Khalifa Hafther, is supporting Hemetti, whose organization, RSF, collaborated with Hafther at the time, as it did together with the UAE and Saudi Arabia throughout the war in Yemen.
In the current context of the war, some local analysts consider that it could be reaching the point where both sides could agree on the partition of the country, since the differences between the Army and the RSF are of such a caliber that a collegiate government would be impossible and the differences would only be settled by one force being able to impose itself absolutely over the other, so that most of the western and southern territories could remain under the control of the RSF, while the army of General al-Burhan would take the north and the east of the country.
In addition to taking into account the numerous regional and tribal forces which, throughout these two and a half months of conflict, have charted their own course by committing themselves, depending on the occasion, to one of the two main sides.The decision to reach this agreement urges fundamentally the army, where cracks and discussions regarding the course of the war, economic and even ideological interests have been detected within this force. All the more so now that the army historically controlled by the riparian elite or of the great Khartoum, as it is also known, has been losing representativeness over the last few years and fundamentally after the coup against Omar al-Bashir in 2019.
It will be necessary to continue to monitor the possibility of partition, because there is a risk that the Hemetti forces could remain in control of all of Darfur, which could guarantee the annihilation of the Masalist people.
Guadi Calvo is an Argentine writer and journalist. International analyst specialized in Africa, Middle East and Central Asia.On Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lineainternacionalGC.
Translation by Internationalist 360°
INTERNATIONALIST 360° 