Darfur

Sudanese children at the Zamzam internal displacement camp in August 2024. Photograph: Mohamed Jamal Jebrel/Reuters

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The situation in El Fasher, North Darfur, has become a humanitarian catastrophe. As fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) escalates, more than 1.5 million people, including those in the Zamzam internal displacement camp, are at immediate risk. The threat of crimes against humanity is real and urgent. Civilians in the region are facing dire conditions, with mass violence, displacement and a paucity of essential resources.

On the other side of the world, in New York, the high-level week of the 79th United Nations general assembly is beginning, gathering the world’s leaders to address the most pressing international challenges.…  Seguir leyendo »

A woman carries aid in sacks at a camp for internally displaced Sudanese people on May 12. (AFP/Getty Images)

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With the world’s gaze directed elsewhere, the specter of genocide again looms over the Darfur region in western Sudan.

The city of El Fasher and its more than 2.5 million residents are in the crosshairs of the military faction known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which controls three of the four main roads leading into the city. Sudan’s government forces (SAF) and several local militias are barely holding on.

The RSF has been laying siege to El Fasher for more than a month. The city’s population is swelling with refugees from other cities and towns across Darfur trying to escape the 13-month civil war.…  Seguir leyendo »

A fire in a livestock market in El Fasher, in North Darfur, in September. Sudanese paramilitary and military forces are fighting for control of the region. Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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There’s a genocide in the making in Darfur, Sudan — for the second time in 20 years. This time, the violence is happening on President Biden’s watch, and he and his administration have not done enough to stop it. But there are two things Mr. Biden can do today that could have real impact: Stop America’s Middle Eastern allies from arming the perpetrators and get behind a Kenyan-led African initiative to end the bloodshed.

In recent weeks, Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, a mercenary-commercial enterprise, has overrun four of the five main cities in Darfur, a region in western Sudan. Each conquest has been followed by massacre and pillage targeting communities of the cities’ darker-skinned residents.…  Seguir leyendo »

A Sudanese woman carrying her daughter on the outskirts of Adre, Chad, July 202. 3Zohra Bensemra / Reuters

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In 2003, mass atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur region shocked the world. A coalition of human rights organizations mobilized in response, accusing Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and his Janjaweed militia of genocide. Although the United Nations did eventually dispatch troops to protect Sudanese civilians, the response was too slow.

Today, Sudan is again ravaged by war, and atrocities are happening on a comparable scale in Darfur. The Janjaweed’s successors are the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), and they are killing, raping and looting the same Darfuri communities. The international response to the war has been glacial and the reaction to the situation in Darfur ever slower.…  Seguir leyendo »

Smoke rises from Abu Zar camp for internally displaced persons in West Darfur, Sudan, on Tuesday, April 6, 2021.

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At least 125 people were brutally killed this month, according to the Western Darfur State Doctors Committee, when Arab and Masalit tribesmen fought running street battles in the Sudanese city of El Geneina. Rocket-propelled grenades hit a hospital and UN compound, according to a UN report, and families who were already forced to flee their homes because of past fighting were pushed out of camps.

Fifteen years ago, I visited El Geneina, West Darfur, as the head of the United Nations humanitarian agency. Darfur was home to mass slaughter at the time. About 300,000 people were eventually killed. I met a mother of three who told me if she left crowded camps to collect firewood she would be raped or beaten by militia.…  Seguir leyendo »

U.N. peacekeeping forces patrol during presidential and legislative elections in the Central African Republic in December 2015. (Issouf Sanogo/AFP/Getty Images)

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Congolese rebels killed eight U.N. peacekeepers on Nov. 15. The same rebel group was responsible for the death of 15 peacekeepers in December 2017, the deadliest single assault on the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Congo in its 25 years of existence.

U.N. peacekeepers also face heavy armed resistance in places such as Mali, South Sudan and the Central African Republic. These serious attacks may obscure another crucial threat to peacekeeping missions: Government forces and rebels obstruct and intimidate peacekeepers to prevent them from fulfilling their civilian protection mandate.

For instance, government forces and the Kamuina Nsapu militia fought in Congo’s Kasai-Central province in March 2017.…  Seguir leyendo »

Sudanese women at a food-distribution center in West Darfur, Sudan, in 2008. The rape and murder of women has been commonplace since Sudanese government began attacking the region in 2003. Credit Lynsey Addario for The New York Times

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Yet another woman is attacked and killed in an isolated place outside her village in Darfur. The story line is terribly familiar, not only from 2003 when the genocide began in Sudan, but to this day. Beyond the village, who notices now? Where is it reported as news? How will justice come if it is not reported, if no one cares?

I care. The woman who was attacked and killed on Aug. 21, 2017, was my sister, Noi.

I care. I am angry. I cry out for justice for Noi.

I am the youngest of seven children, five of whom survived, until now.…  Seguir leyendo »

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The ongoing crisis in Darfur has long since dropped out of public view, overshadowed by Syria and other more recent global crises. But Darfur is back in the headlines because the government of Sudan has just held a three-day referendum (11-13 April) on its political future. Voters were asked whether they wanted Darfur to become a single region or to continue to be administered as five separate federal states. Some 3.5 million people were registered to vote. Officials have claimed a high voter turnout, but witnesses on the ground have reported seeing many empty polling stations. The results are expected later in April.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Darfur may have dropped out of international headlines, but that does not mean the region enjoys peace. Far from it. A renewed escalation of violence by the Sudanese government against non-Arab ethnic groups threatens to compound a humanitarian disaster that, according to United Nations estimates, over the past 13 years displaced more than 2.7 million people in Darfur and an additional 380,000 refugees to eastern Chad.

Darfur has become a focus again because the regime in Khartoum is desperate to end one of three active rebellions in the country, conflicts that have left its military badly overstretched while a failing economy is causing civil unrest.…  Seguir leyendo »

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It is now a year since the guilty plea by BNP Paribas, the French banking giant, to charges by the Department of Justice that it had done clandestine business with the governments of Sudan, Iran and Cuba, countries that were subject to economic sanctions. Over the period covered in the indictment, from 2004 to 2012, the amount that was criminally laundered came to more than $8.8 billion, which determined the size of the penalty.

The bulk of these illegal transactions — about $6.4 billion, or more than 70 percent — involved Sudan, whose president, Omar al-Bashir, was indicted in 2009-10 by the International Criminal Court for multiple counts of crimes against humanity and genocide in Darfur.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Le président sud-africain Jacob Zuma est dans la tourmente. Il a décidé de laisser filer Omar el Béchir, son homologue soudanais sous le coup d’un mandat d’arrêt de la Cour pénale internationale (CPI) pour crimes contre l’humanité et génocide commis sous ses ordres au Darfour. L’Afrique du Sud en tant qu’Etat parti de la CPI aurait dû procéder à son interpellation et le transférer à La Haye. Zuma s’est abrité derrière « l’immunité » des participants au XXVe sommet des chefs de gouvernements de l’Union africaine (UA) qui se tenait à Johannesburg. Cette décision est lourde de conséquences.

Et d’abord de mettre en échec la justice internationale qui a pourtant exercé de vives pressions pour que l’Afrique du Sud honore ses engagements.…  Seguir leyendo »

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The Darfur genocide in western Sudan — the first genocide of the 21st century and the longest one in more than a century — is about to achieve another distinction. It will be the first genocide in which the victims will be abandoned. An international peacekeeping force designed to halt violence against civilians and humanitarians — the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur, or UNAMID — is on the verge of being gutted or perhaps eliminated altogether.

This is despite the fact that some 3 million people have been internally displaced or turned into refugees; almost 500,000 were displaced last year alone.…  Seguir leyendo »

George Clooney on Sudan’s Rape of Darfur

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In the early 2000s, a brutal conflict in western Sudan between the government and rebels led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Darfuris, with millions displaced as refugees. In 2004, the United States declared Sudan’s actions a genocide.

After that spike in attention and concern, the world has largely forgotten about Darfur. Unfortunately, the government of Sudan has not.

Because Sudan’s government routinely blocks journalists from going into the Darfur region and severely restricts access for humanitarian workers, any window into life there is limited. The government has hammered the joint peacekeeping mission of the United Nations and African Union into silence about human rights concerns by shutting down the United Nations human rights office in the capital, Khartoum, hampering investigators of alleged human rights abuses and pressuring the peacekeeping force to withdraw.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Des policiers ivres parcourant les rues en titubant et en tirant des coups de feu au hasard. Un garçon de 14 ans atteint par une balle perdue alors qu'il dînait avec sa famille. Deux garçons tués après que les objets qu'ils prenaient pour des jouets explosent. Une jeune fille de 17 ans enceinte enlevée par des miliciens armés, victime d'un viol collectif puis jetée sur la route. Cinq personnes, dont un enfant, qui faisaient la queue à un point d'eau, réduites à néant par les bombes du gouvernement. Razzias de villages par des centaines d'hommes de tribus munis d'armes que leur a fournies le gouvernement.…  Seguir leyendo »

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If you had had the opportunity three months ahead of time to prevent Darfur's genocide, what would you have done?

The world faces such an opportunity today. On Jan. 9, just 84 days from now, the people of southern Sudan and of the disputed region of Abyei -- which straddles northern and southern Sudan -- will vote in referendums on self-determination. If held freely and fairly, these votes will result in an independent, oil-rich Southern Sudan. If not, the catastrophic war between the north and the south that ended in 2005, after 2.5 million deaths, could resume.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, the man responsible for prosecuting both that war and the Darfur genocide, which has resulted in an estimated 300,000 deaths since 2003, doesn't want to be the one who lost the south.…  Seguir leyendo »

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No more excuses. No more denial. This week, the international criminal court issued an arrest warrant for three charges of genocide against the president of Sudan, Omar al-Bashir.

The world once claimed ignorance of the Nazi atrocities. Fifty years later, the world refused to recognise an unfolding genocide in Rwanda. On Darfur, the world is now officially on notice.

The genocide is not over. Bashir's forces continue to use different weapons to commit genocide: bullets, rape and hunger. For example, the court found that Bashir's forces have raped on a mass scale in Darfur. They raped thousands of women and used these rapes to degrade family and community members.…  Seguir leyendo »

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While Ros Wynne-Jones does address some of the dangers that threaten Sudan's 2005 comprehensive peace agreement, this year's elections, and the 2011 referendum, she combines convoluted conflict histories with gloomy predictions, to present only the bleakest picture (Sudan's new year of fear, 6 January).

Her claim, for example, that Darfur's internally displaced population's "fate is worse than death" relies on outdated stereotypes and ignores the fact that UN figures show Darfur's mortality rate to be below the region's pre-conflict level – and lower than the figures for sub-­Saharan Africa. Médecins Sans Frontières have noted that Darfuris are receiving better healthcare than people in other parts of Sudan, in some cases even better than those in Khartoum.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Thirty Sudanese political leaders will meet in Washington today with 170 observers from 32 countries and international organizations, as well as four African former prime ministers, to confront the issues that are slowly pushing Sudan over a cliff. The United States ought to be in a commanding position to mediate in these negotiations, as it did in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement that ended 22 years of civil war between Sudan's North and South. But disputes within the Obama administration are inhibiting U.S. efforts to stop Sudan's slide toward civil war at a time when unified American leadership is essential.

First, let's consider the situation.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Darfur: el estado de la situación humanitaria y de seguridad en 2009.

Introducción:

Según datos de principios de 2009, el conflicto en Sudán ha provocado hasta este momento el asesinato de unas 300.000 personas, que 4,7 millones dependan de la ayuda humanitaria y que 2,7 millones de ellas hayan tenido que abandonar sus hogares, convertidos en desplazados y refugiados, hacinándose en alguno de los 200 insalubres, superpoblados y peligrosos campamentos de refugiados instalados tanto en el propio Darfur como en Chad, país al que esta situación plantea graves problemas. Por si fuera poco, Darfur es una de las regiones más pobres del mundo, sufre una inexorable desertización que obliga a luchar por cada gota de agua y sus líderes padecen una crónica y patética ansia de poder personal que les hace indiferentes a los sufrimientos de los seres humanos que de ellos dependen.…  Seguir leyendo »

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Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir was predictably defiant yesterday in response to the International Criminal Court's decision to issue an order for his arrest because of his war in Sudan's western Darfur region. More than four years ago, the United States correctly called Khartoum's action in Darfur "genocide." But the Bush administration did nothing to stop the killings. Now this ongoing nightmare competes with the ailing economy for U.S. attention. But prioritizing Darfur would make clear that the Obama administration can rally international cooperation to resolve thorny security problems.

President Obama, Vice President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.N.…  Seguir leyendo »