Khartoum’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are using present fighting with rebels (SLA/Abdel Wahid) to continue ethnically-targeted destruction of the Fur people in Jebel Marra. Villages are being destroyed, tens of thousands have been displaced (see Radio Dabanga dispatch below), and UNAMID—per usual—is helpless. Nor has there been any international condemnation, a fact well noted by the Khartoum regime, which also knows that UNAMID is utterly incapable of halting civilian destruction or assisting with humanitarian access.
This campaign is are not simply beating back against SLA/AW, but using assaults on civilians as a way of making civilians pay a price that will seem intolerable, even to the SLA. Such military tactics as have been in evidence for more than a week constitute war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity under the Rome Treaty that is the statutory basis for the International Criminal Court. The Court has served arrest warrants for crimes against humanity to several of the regime’s members (and a warrant charging President Omar al-Bashir with genocide).
The Darfur genocide began in the Jebel Marra region fifteen years ago; ethnically-targeted human destruction continues—in short, genocide is ongoing…the longest and most “successful” genocide in modern history, with 3 million Darfuris displaced from their homes and more than 500,000 dead from the direct and indirect effects of Khartoum-orchestrated violence.
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Darfur: 50,000 civilians taking refuge in Jebel Marra caves | Radio Dabanga, April 5, 2018 | LIBEI
An estimated 50,000 people displaced by recent fighting between government troops and rebels in Darfur’s Jebel Marra, are reportedly taking refuge in mountain caves in the Libei area.
Eric Reeves,
Senior Fellow at Harvard University’s François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights