The United States on Tuesday accused a group of Sudanese soldiers and their proxies of carrying out the massacre, taking them out of the picture of uncontrollable brutality and drawing fresh attention to the scale of atrocities in Africa’s largest war.
Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said the Rapid Support Forces, a group of Sudan’s anti-militia forces, has committed acts of genocide, including a horrific wave of ethnic violence in the western Darfur region.
The Ministry of Finance supported the genocide decision with a series of sanctions targeting the leader of the RSF, General Mohamed Hamdan, and seven companies from the United Arab Emirates, the group’s main foreign sponsor, who traded weapons and gold on his behalf. .
“The RSF and allied forces have systematically killed men and boys – even infants – on racial lines, and deliberately targeted women and girls from certain ethnic groups for rape and other forms of brutal gender-based violence,” said Mr. Blinken in the statement. “Those soldiers targeted fleeing civilians, killed innocent civilians fleeing the war, and prevented the remaining civilians from accessing life-saving supplies.”
The genocide determination comes two decades after the United States took a similar step in 2004, when then-Secretary of State Colin Powell determined that the Janjaweed, a brutal militia allied with the Sudanese military, committed genocide during an anti-insurgency campaign in Darfur.
The Janjaweed later joined the fast-moving army. But instead of uniting with the Sudanese army, the group is now fighting it, in a civil war that has plunged one of Africa’s largest countries into a devastating famine, killed tens of thousands of people and forced more than 11 million people – almost one-quarter of Sudan’s population – to flee their homes, according to the United Nations.
Atrocities and war crimes have been committed on both sides, say officials from the United States, the United Nations and human rights groups. The military has repeatedly killed civilians with indiscriminate shelling, sometimes killing dozens at once.
But only the RSF is accused of ethnic cleansing, especially during the systematic violence in Darfur between April 2023 – when the civil war began – and November of that year. Its fighters, many of whom are Arabs, targeted Masalit members, who are not Arabs, in a brutal attack that became the focus of a US genocide trial, said two senior US officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss. sensitive diplomatic issues.
The number of such violence is unclear. The Sudanese Red Crescent said it counted 2,000 bodies in one day, then stopped counting. UN investigators later estimated that 15,000 people were killed in the city of Geneina alone.
Hundreds of thousands of Masalits have since fled to Chad, where they live in filthy and overcrowded camps – part of an exodus of three million Sudanese people pushed to neighboring countries by the war, the United Nations said.
General Hamdan, the leader of the RSF, is a camel trader who rose to prominence as a central Janjaweed commander in the 2000s. Once a loyal friend of Sudan’s independent ruler, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was overthrown in 2019, General Hamdan became rich after seizing Sudan’s largest gold mine, and by sending troops to Yemen.
Just last year, General Hamdan’s troops invaded Sudan, and he embarked on a tour of six African countries where he presented himself as the leader of the watch.
But recently, his forces have lost some ground, and new American measures could hinder his ability to travel, use the international financial system, or present himself as a champion of democratic aspirations, as he often does. Given the number of rapes by soldiers in Darfur under the control of General Hamdan, the State Department said it is barring him and his family from traveling to the United States.
The genocide decision followed months of deliberation within the US government, as lawyers and intelligence officials analyzed the merits of the case, the two senior US officials said. Some officials are reluctant to support the decision because they fear it could draw further criticism from the Biden administration for its refusal to declare Israel’s operation in the Gaza Strip a massacre of Palestinians, the officials said.
But on Monday, while traveling to Asia, Mr. Blinken signed the genocide resolution.
Under international law, the findings do not compel the US to take action, although officials say the sanctions give immediate teeth to the measure. Experts say it could fuel a new campaign of accountability for a war that has killed as many as 150,000 people, according to US estimates, and caused one of the world’s worst famines in decades.
Last month, the international hunger watchdog, known as the IPC, confirmed that the famine is continuing in five regions of Sudan, and said that it is likely to spread to five other regions in the coming months. Nationwide, 25 million people died of starvation, the body said.
The RSF has used aid as a weapon of war, denying aid to other areas and violating an agreement signed during the failed US-led peace talks in Switzerland in August, the Treasury Department said in a statement.
The genocide determination may bring new scrutiny to the United Arab Emirates’ role in the war. The Emirates provided the RSF with smuggled weapons and powerful drones, according to American officials and physical evidence collected by the New York Times.
The Emirates also provides an important financial and logistical hub from which the RSF can trade gold and buy weapons through a network of companies.
Capital Tap Holding, one of the seven Emirati companies sanctioned on Tuesday, owns 50 other companies in ten countries that have provided money and military equipment to the RSF, the Ministry of Finance said. Another company, AZ Gold, traded millions of dollars in gold.
The Ministry of Finance also fined a Sudanese businessman, Abu Dharr, who is listed as the owner of at least five of the seven companies.
Mr. Blinken said that the discovery of killings does not mean that the United States is supporting the Sudanese army in the war. “Both rebels are responsible for the violence and suffering in Sudan and they have no authority to rule a peaceful Sudan in the future,” he said.
Tom Perriello, the US special envoy to Sudan, said that in order to end the war, the two sides must “agree to the cessation of hostilities for a political transition.”
Critics who have accused the United States of doing too little in Sudan welcomed the findings, with caveats.
“This attempt to put the administration on the right side of history will not work,” said Cameron Hudson, a former US diplomat and Sudan expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, speaking on social media for the Biden administration. “It’s too late and too many people have died for that to happen.”
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