Genocide can be read as a symptom of both social and political collapse; the hollowing out of values and relationships which sustain our humanity and the degradation of nations into regimes of authoritarian tyranny and state terror as they become delegitimized.
It is the ultimate crime, and the end state of authorized national identities and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, of the weaponization of fear and faith in service to power through divisions and hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness.
In Sudan a civil war rages and devolves into the horrors of genocide, a war which is also a proxy Great Powers conflict between the Arab-American Alliance and Russia for dominion in this theatre of World War Three. Here the past swallows the future and cannibalizes our hope for a humankind united as guarantors of each other’s universal human rights.
Sudan is a classic example of the problems faith as national identity and of the Double Minority as in Northern Ireland or Israel and Palestine, wherein both historically Islamic and Christian identities have been deployed in service to power. This is now compounded by having become a wishbone of empires.
Herein we play two bad choices against each other in hope of creating a free space of play for liberation and democracy, and at risk of either side consolidating power as a tyrannical regime, while whole peoples die.
The strategy and goal of the Arab-American Alliance is simple; overthrow the regime of Russia’s client state with our champion Hemedti, a key regional ally whose child soldiers enforce our power in Yemen and elsewhere, who also happens to be a warlord, slave raider, and mining robber king whose wealth and power are built on the lives of indigenous Black people. This means that we need him in the Great Game and cannot disavow him, but also that his campaign of genocide against the Black Christian peoples has destabilized the whole region, abetted Islamization and brought America into alignment with forces inimical to our political interests and long range goals, and subverted our goal in Sudan of a secular and multiethnic democracy.
Here is a parallel of why American abandoned Afghanistan; we needed the Taliban as a buffer state and counterforce to Iran, more than we needed the wealth from control of its heroin fields.
The use of social force is subversive of its own values in the enforcement of virtue.
For myself, I would dearly love to break the power of the Russian Empire and liberate Africa and the world from Putin’s colonialist tyranny and terror, but not at the cost of a genocide.
In Sudan we must change our strategy, envision a new path to a free society of equals, and bring the Chaos.
Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, but in liberation struggle only.
No matter where you begin with songs of the Elect and Others, of purity and contamination, virtue and monstrosity, obedience and transgression, identification of the Infinite with those who claim to speak in his name and enforce our submission to their will, with the idea that some of us are better and truly more human than others on the basis of any of this, with subjugation to those who claim to speak in our name and would enslave us defined as good and freedom from systems of force and control as evil, and with the use of social force in service to elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, you always end up at the gates of Auschwitz.
And this we must Resist, and give reply with the words found written on its death chambers after Liberation; Never Again!
As written by Simon Tisdall in The Guardian, in an article entitled China, Myanmar and now Darfur … the horror of genocide is here again: Each time it happens, the world insists: ‘never again’. But the political and moral blindspots that allow these atrocities will persist until the lessons of history are learned; “
It’s happening again. In Darfur, scene of a genocide that killed 300,000 people and displaced millions 20 years ago, armed militias are on the rampage once more. Now, as then, they are targeting ethnic African tribes, murdering, raping and stealing with impunity. “They” are nomadic, ethnic Arab raiders, the much-feared “devils on horseback” – except now they ride in trucks. They’re called the Janjaweed. And they’re back.
How is it possible such horrors can be repeated? The world condemned the 2003 slaughter. The UN and the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigated. Sudan’s former president, Omar al-Bashir, was charged with genocide and crimes against humanity along with his principal allies. The trial of one suspect, known as Ali Kushayb, opened last year. Yet Bashir and the guilty men have evaded justice so far.
It’s a familiar story. Throughout history, genocide, the most heinous of crimes, has often gone unpunished. The UN’s 1948 Genocide Convention defined it as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. It is universally proscribed. States are legally bound to prevent it. Yet there’s a tendency to look away. In Xinjiang, Myanmar and elsewhere, the convention’s “odious scourge” rages unchecked.
For its part, Sudan goes from bad to worse. The Janjaweed are allied to the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – paramilitaries warring with the army for control of the country. The RSF commander, known as Hemedti, was a Janjaweed leader in 2003. Like others, he has never faced justice. The UN warns with growing urgency that “crimes against humanity” are being committed in Darfur. It seems only too obvious where this is headed.
Genocide, typically, is a “never again” event. So terrible and long-lasting are its effects that survivors insist it cannot ever be repeated. The Holocaust – the murder of six million European Jews by Nazi Germany – is the supreme, modern example of genocidal evil. Yet even that abomination has not dispelled a more general amnesia (or deliberate forgetting) about the past, nor deterred present-day emulators. “Never again” never works.
The denial of recognition and justice to genocide’s historical victims helps explain today’s political and moral blindspots. In a powerful essay in the New York Review of Books last month, Ed Vulliamy, a former Guardian and Observer Bosnian war correspondent, highlights one such case of “invisibility”: the 19th-century drive to exterminate California’s Native American tribes.
“They were totally deprived of land rights. They were… treated as wild animals, shot on sight… enslaved and worked to death… Their life was outlawed and their whole existence was condemned,” an official report later admitted. Nowhere were efforts to destroy Indigenous peoples’ lives and culture more “methodically savage” than in California, Vulliamy writes. Yet who remembers now? Who even knew?
To his credit, the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has sponsored a California Truth and Healing Council to collect descendants’ testimony and formulate proposals for recognition, recompense and restorative justice. Newsom is clear about what happened. “It’s called genocide… No other way to describe it,” he said when setting up the council. Such candour is rare.
Most European countries, Britain especially, formerly exhibited genocidal tendencies. Australia, too. The genocide of the Herero, Nama and other Aboriginal peoples by early 20th-century German settlers in what is now Namibia is another instance of obliterated history recently brought painfully to light. Thousands were machine-gunned by the colonists. Pornographic photographs of sexually-abused women were sent home as postcards. Foreshadowing Nazi atrocities, macabre medical experiments were conducted on prisoners.
In 2021, a belatedly apologetic Germany agreed reparations with Namibia’s government. But the deal is on hold. Victims’ groups object, saying they were not consulted. As in other historical genocides, like that suffered by Ottoman-era Armenians in 1915-17, facts are disputed, responsibility is repudiated, and reconciliation remains elusive. Referred pain is just too powerful.
Genocide prosecutions make gradual advances. Last week, a court in Paris jailed for life a Rwandan military policeman, Philippe Hategekimana, for his role in the slaughter of 800,000 people, mostly minority ethnic Tutsis, in 1994. Following the Bosnian war, former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic and the Bosnian Serb leaders, Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic, were tried for genocide.
But national courts in Germany and France exercising “universal jurisdiction”, the much-undermined ICC (the US, Russia and China reject its authority), special courts (as in Sierra Leone) and ad hoc, Yugoslavia-style international tribunals, such as that urged for Ukraine, are struggling to keep up with the sheer scale of atrocious behaviour around the world.
Why, for example, is Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, not prosecuted for attempted genocide of Kurdish and Sunni groups under the terms of the 1948 convention? Russia’s Vladimir Putin should surely face similar action over Ukraine – in addition to the ICC’s war crimes warrant. Last week’s pizza restaurant bombing in Kramatorsk could be exhibit A, though in truth there are not enough letters in the alphabet to list all Putin’s crimes.
Treating genocide as a rare, usually historical occurrence is nonsense. It’s happening today in Darfur. It’s happening in Myanmar, where minority Rohingyas are persecuted and displaced by a vicious military junta. And it’s happening in China with the documented mass detention, forced labour, involuntary sterilisation, family separation and religious persecution of Uyghurs in Xinjiang.
As the US government says, such cruelty exactly fits the definition of genocide with intent. So why not indict President Xi Jinping? The UN Human Rights Council’s shameful vote to ignore its own damning Xinjiang investigation shows why this suggestion is impractical to the point of absurdity. It shows the depth of the problem with genocide denialism that the world still faces.
It’s why impunity rules. It’s why the killers keep killing. It’s why the Janjaweed ride again.”
As I wrote in my post of April 16 2023, Chaos Is the Great Hope of the Powerless: the Case of Sudan; In Sudan the legacies of our history return to savage us with terror and cruelty, as consequences of the Darfur War and the tyranny of the monstrous Omar al-Bashir, for though he has been brought a Reckoning as the figurehead of atavistic forces of fascisms of faith and race and the nihilistic wanton capitalism of elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, the forces which created him live on after he is fallen, conserving inequalities of power.
All use of social force and violence obeys Newton’s Third Law of Motion, and creates its own resistance. This is both an existential threat to be feared, and an opportunity for transformative change to be desired.
Such are the true aims and means of politics as the art of the possible; to dream and make real visions of fear and desire.
Sudan began the Arab Spring, and was among its victims as failure of vision and the persistence of evil as unequal power.
In this moment the Rapid Support Forces led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, remnants of Omar al-Bashir’s army of madness and criminality, challenges the government of Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who has repressed the democracy movement with great brutality.
The fall of tyrants and seizures of power are goals and objectives of revolution, but we must also bring change to unjust systems if we are to free ourselves from the legacies of history and dream new and better ways to be human together. As proof of my thesis I offer you the case of Sudan, where warlords struggle for dominion in the wake of the collapse of the hope of democracy.
And this moment of chaos is also one of opportunity, for as Guillermo del Toro has written in his great telenovela Carnival Row, “Who is Chaos good for? Chaos is good for us. Chaos is the great hope of the powerless.”
Let us use the enemies of liberty against each other, and bring to Sudan a free society of equals who act as each other guarantors of universal human rights.
Let us bring the Chaos.
As written by Adam Fulton in The Guardian, in an article entitled Sudan conflict: why is there fighting and what is at stake in the region?; ”Power struggle between military factions erupted after faltering transition to civilian-led government; “Clashes between Sudan’s military and the country’s main paramilitary force have left at least 56 dead, while control of the presidential palace and the international airport in Khartoum is in doubt after disputed claims from both sides, in fighting that threatens to destabilise Sudan and the wider region.
What’s behind the fighting?
The clashes erupted amid an apparent power struggle between the two main factions of Sudan’s military regime.
The Sudanese armed forces are broadly loyal to Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the country’s de facto ruler, while the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a collection of militia, follow the former warlord Gen Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti.
The power struggle has its roots in the years before a 2019 uprising that ousted the dictatorial ruler Omar al-Bashir, who built up formidable security forces that he deliberately set against one another.
When an effort to transition to a democratic civilian-led government faltered after Bashir’s fall, an eventual showdown appeared inevitable, with diplomats in Khartoum warning in early 2022 that they feared such an outbreak of violence. In recent weeks, tensions have risen further.
How did the military rivalries develop?
The RSF was founded by Bashir to crush a rebellion in Darfur that began more than 20 years ago due to the political and economic marginalisation of the local people by Sudan’s central government. The RSF were also known by the name of Janjaweed, which became associated with widespread atrocities.
In 2013, Bashir transformed the Janjaweed into a semi-organised paramilitary force and gave their leaders military ranks before deploying them to crush a rebellion in South Darfur and then dispatching many to fight in the war in Yemen, and later Libya.
The RSF, led by Hemedti, and the regular military forces under Burhan cooperated to oust Bashir in 2019. The RSF then dispersed a peaceful sit-in that was held in front of the military headquarters in Khartoum, killing hundreds of people and raping dozens more.
A power-sharing deal with the civilians who led the protests against Bashir, which was supposed to bring about a transition towards a democratic government, was interrupted by a coup in October 2021.
The coup put the army back in charge but it faced weekly protests, renewed isolation and deepening economic woes. Hemedti swung behind the plan for a new transition, bringing tensions with Burhan to the surface.
Hemedti has huge wealth derived from the export of gold from illegal mines, and commands tens of thousands of battle-hardened veterans. He has long chafed at his position as official deputy on Sudan’s ruling council.
What are the faultlines?
A central cause of tension since the uprising is the civilian demand for oversight of the military and integration of the RSF into the regular armed forces.
Civilians have also called for the handover of lucrative military holdings in agriculture, trade and other industries, a crucial source of power for an army that has often outsourced military action to regional militias.
Another point of contention is the pursuit of justice over allegations of war crimes by the military and its allies in the conflict in Darfur from 2003. The international criminal court is seeking trials for Bashir and other Sudanese suspects.
Justice is also being sought over the killings of pro-democracy protesters in June 2019, in which military forces are implicated. Activists and civilian groups have been angered by delays to an official investigation. In addition, they want justice for at least 125 people killed by security forces in protests since the 2021 coup.
What’s at stake in the region?
Sudan is in a volatile region bordering the Red Sea, the Sahel region and the Horn of Africa. Its strategic location and agricultural wealth have attracted regional power plays, complicating the chances of a successful transition to civilian-led government.
Several of Sudan’s neighbours – including Ethiopia, Chad and South Sudan – have been affected by political upheavals and conflict, and Sudan’s relationship with Ethiopia, in particular, has been strained over issues including disputed farmland along their border.
Major geopolitical dimensions are also at play, with Russia, the US, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and other powers battling for influence in Sudan.
The Saudis and the UAE have seen Sudan’s transition as an opportunity to push back against Islamist influence in the region. They, along with the US and Britain, form the “Quad”, which has sponsored mediation in Sudan along with the UN and the African Union. Western powers fear the potential for a Russian base on the Red Sea, which Sudanese military leaders have expressed openness to.”
As I wrote in my post of February 12 2020 Sudan: Justice for the Victims of the Darfur War; Pandora’s Box has been opened once again in Sudan today, this time signaling not the escape of evils but the rediscovery of hope as yesterday the government agrees to surrender the monster and outcast former tyrant Omar al-Bashir to the International Criminal Court to be tried for genocide and war crimes during the Darfur War.
Both slave revolt and revolutionary struggle by Black African tribal peoples against oligarchic Arab elites who traditionally have used them as a herd for slave labor, the Darfur War became a war of survival against the genocidal and horrific campaign of repression and ethnic cleansing which was the government’s response. It was a war of race and class marked by the worst aspects of both kinds of conflict, ending in April 2019 with the overthrow and arrest of the tyrant, first success of our Revolution in the Year of the Reckoning.
In the words of Annum Masroor writing in Huffpost; “In the Darfur conflict, rebels from the territory’s ethnic central and sub-Saharan African community launched an insurgency in 2003, complaining of oppression by the Arab-dominated government in Khartoum.
The government responded with a scorched-earth assault of aerial bombings and unleashed militias known as the Janjaweed, who are accused of mass killings and rapes. Up to 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were driven from their homes.”
As written by Ishaan Tharoor with Sammy Westfall in The Washington Post’s newsletter, in an article entitled Behind chaos in Sudan is a broader global power struggle; “The battles that have raged for three days in Sudan have all the markings of a potential civil war. Dueling armed factions — the country’s military, led by Sudanese president and top commander Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and a major paramilitary force known as the Rapid Support Forces, led by Vice President Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo — clashed in the capital of Khartoum and other cities.
The fighting, triggered apparently by disputes over how to integrate the RSF into the military, has even involved airstrikes against rival targets and has impacted dense urban areas, leading to the deaths of more than 180 people, according to a U.N. official, with the toll expected to rise. It has also claimed the lives of three Sudanese people working for the U.N.’s World Food Program, while there were reports Monday evening of assaults on Western diplomats.
The two feuding generals have cast a long shadow over Sudanese politics. They both built their careers waging a brutal counterinsurgency against an uprising in the country’s western Darfur region that began in 2003; the atrocities carried out against the rebellion are seen as acts of genocide. Dagalo, known universally as Hemedti, came to the fore as the leader of a notorious pro-government Arab militia known as the Janjaweed, which later morphed into the RSF.
After being part of the military establishment that decided in 2019 to oust long-ruling dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Burhan and Hemedti would later collaborate in bringing down a fragile civilian-led government in 2021. All the while, their soldiers intimidated and brutalized Sudanese pro-democracy activists and dissidents and a constellation of foreign powers cultivated both as assets in their own regional games.
Warlords in a country long-riven by militias and insurgencies, the two are now locked in a classic internecine conflict. “Both sides have bases across the country,” said Alan Boswell, head analyst for the Horn of Africa at the International Crisis Group think tank, to the Financial Times. “Both see this fight in existential terms. This is a pure power struggle for who will control Sudan.”
Burhan and Hemedti were supposed to be stewards of a political transition back toward democracy, but they appear to have for their own reasons balked on that process. “The failure to form a government and the deterioration of the economic and security situation in the country, prompted the various military and civilian parties to sign a framework agreement in December 2022, which was widely accepted by civilians and important and influential parties from the international and regional communities,” explained a story in Asharq Al-Awsat, an influential Arabic-language daily.
Instead, unable to come to terms with the forging of an apolitical army, the two leaders came to blows. Boswell said that “this war is already dashing any hopes for the quick restoration of civilian rule,” and added that it “risks sucking in many outside actors and spilling across Sudan’s borders if not arrested soon.”
“Now, fighting could turn into a protracted conflict, with many fearing that the war could drag in regional patrons and neighbors such as Chad, Egypt, Eritrea and Ethiopia. In the end, nobody knows if the RSF or army will vanquish the other, but their quest could upend the region,” wrote Mat Nashed in New Lines magazine.
While it may ripple across borders, the chaos in Sudan also is fueled, in part, by outside players. The interim regime dominated by Burhan and Hemedti has been propped up by billions of dollars in Emirati and Saudi financing. Egypt has stepped up its support of Burhan’s forces, while Russia, and in particular the influential Wagner Group mercenaries, has developed apparent ties and contacts with Hemedti’s forces. Sudanese fighters, particularly from Darfur, have ended up on the front lines of both the Saudi- and Emirati-led war effort in Yemen, as well as the conflict in Libya, where a thicket of regional powers, including the UAE, Qatar, Libya and Russia, were all involved.
Various regional powers eye Sudan’s Red Sea coast including Russia, which has a potential deal in place to set up a naval base in Sudan that would give Moscow a path into the Indian Ocean. So, too, the UAE, which “hopes to protect its long-term strategic interests in Sudan, including the ability to project military and economic power into Yemen and the Horn of Africa from ports and other installations there,” noted a policy brief from the Soufan Center, a global security think tank. “In December 2022, coinciding with the Sudan framework agreement, the UAE and Sudan signed a $6 billion agreement for two UAE firms to build a new port on Sudan’s Red Sea coast.”
Hemedti’s RSF reportedly control the bulk of Sudan’s lucrative gold mines, which has given him an apparent independent line of financing fueled by an illicit trade of smuggled ore that analysts say winds its way through the UAE and into Russian hands. Western analysts fear the expanding footprint of Wagner, which has cultivated ties with coup-plotting regimes in Mali and Burkina Faso, and carried out counterinsurgency operations in the Central African Republic. French officials, in particular, have warned of the Kremlin’s growing clout in the restive Sahel.
“In the post Ukraine invasion-world, Hemedti’s more obvious relationship with Russian mercenary group Wagner has put him in the cross-hairs of international machinations across the Sahel,” wrote Kholood Khair, a Khartoum-based analyst. “For Cairo, the prospect of eliminating Hemedti is too good an opportunity to pass up, and the timing is right with western attention coalescing around halting the domino effect of former French colonies turning their backs on Paris in favor of Moscow.”
Egypt, which has in recent years supported Saudi and Emirati regional initiatives, is a more conspicuous supporter of Burhan, who Cairo sees as a bulwark of stability and a potential ally in geopolitical squabbles with Ethiopia over the construction of a major dam on the Nile. On Monday, there were reports of Hemedti’s forces detaining a contingent of Egyptian soldiers deployed in Sudan, a move that risks further expanding the arc of the conflict.
A host of foreign governments, including the United States, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, urged a cessation in hostilities. But both generals have vowed to crush the other and show little sign of backing down. “Western nations have little leverage right now. Sudan has been largely isolated since Hemedti and Burhan seized power in a coup in 2021 that ended a short-lived civilian government,” my colleagues explained. “The debt-laden Horn of Africa nation desperately needs tens of billions of dollars to shore up its moribund economy, but deals are unlikely as long as the two men remain in power and fighting each other. Sudan’s economy tanked after the oil-rich south gained independence in 2011, and hyperinflation fed frequent street protests.”
Bashir’s ouster led to Sudan, Africa’s third-largest nation, coming somewhat out of the cold. The U.S. State Department removed it from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, while both Burhan and Hemedti carried out tours of various world capitals. But Khair and other figures in Sudanese civil society argue that, in the current desperate context, neither military ruler should be backed as a figure to stabilize the situation.
“All the activists and civilians have been saying the whole time, do not trust these two. They are killers; they have been killing for 30 years,” Dallia Mohamed Abdelmoniem, a Khartoum resident and former journalist, told my colleagues. “This is who the international community has been placating.”
The Washington Post newsletter
Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, Ben Kiernan
Sudan on brink of all-out civil war/ The Guardian
Sudan, South Sudan, and the Darfur War, a reading list
First Raise A Flag: How South Sudan Won the Longest War but Lost the Peace,
Peter Martell
South Sudan: The Untold Story from Independence to the Civil War, Hilde F. Johnson, Desmond Tutu (Foreword)
War of Visions: Conflict of Identities in the Sudan, Francis Mading Deng
For Love of the Prophet: An Ethnography of Sudan’s Islamic State, Noah Salomon
The Darfur Sultanate: A History, R.S. O’Fahey
Torch of Liberty 
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