Sudan’s Repressed Democracy
In June 2019, shortly after directing the massacre of a sit-in outside the army’s headquarters in the Sudanese capital, Mohammed Hamdan Daglo “Hemetti”—the commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a mercenary army of over 100,000 men—warned that “Khartoum could become Kutum”. He was referring to a much fought-over little town in North Darfur that Le Monde reported was once “emptied of its inhabitants” by his militiamen. “People will abandon the high houses, only the cats will remain”.
Today Hemetti is fulfilling his threat. Since fighting broke out between Sudan’s army and the RSF in April, Khartoum, a city with a population of close to nine million in its metropolitan area, has been abandoned by well over a million people—including most of the wealthy bourgeois families of the old city, whose comfortable “high houses”, when not reduced to ashes, have been stormed by the tens of thousands of looting young adventurers Hemetti has recruited from the lumpenproletariat of Darfur and the rural areas of Chad, the Central African Republic, Niger, and Mali.… Seguir leyendo »