UN Reports Human Rights Violations in Sudan, Some Amounting to War Crimes

In Sudan, a recent United Nations fact-finding mission documented “harrowing” human rights violations committed by both the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, including indiscriminate attacks on civilians, schools, hospitals, water and power supplies. Civilians have also been subjected to torture, arbitrary detention and gruesome sexual violence. Over 20,000 people have been killed and 13 million displaced over the past 16 months. The war has also destroyed the country’s healthcare system and caused an outbreak of diseases like cholera, malaria and dengue. Sky News correspondent Yousra Elbagir, whose reporting helped uncover details of a June 2023 massacre of civilians by the RSF in North Darfur, says the world is showing “complete apathy and neglect” over the violence in Sudan today. We also speak with Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, a senior researcher at Human Rights Watch, who says countries including Russia, China and Iran are supplying both sides with advanced weapons that are “very likely to be used to commit human rights violations and war crimes.”

TRANSCRIPT

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Sudan, where a U.N. fact-finding mission has reported “harrowing” human rights violations, many of which amount to war crimes, committed by both the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Members of the U.N. mission described indiscriminate attacks by the warring parties on civilians, schools, hospitals, water and power supplies. Civilians have also been subjected to torture, arbitrary detention and gruesome sexual violence by both sides.

JOY NGOZI EZEILO: In the context of the current conflict, civilians, an overwhelming majority of whom are women and children, are women and girls, were and continue to be targeted with sexual violation, in particular rape, gang rape, by both parties to the conflict. Members of the RSF in particular have perpetrated sexual violence on a large scale in the context of attacks on cities in Darfur region and the greater Khartoum area.

AMY GOODMAN: Sudan’s military and the RSF rejected calls by the U.N. experts to deploy an international force to protect civilians from the devastating war that erupted in April of 2023, so far killing more than 20,000 people, displacing some 13 million from their homes. This is the World Health Organization’s chief, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, speaking from Port Sudan.

TEDROS ADHANOM GHEBREYESUS: Sudanese are suffering through a perfect storm of crisis: over 500 days of conflict; the largest level of displacement in the world; famine in some parts and risk of this in others; 25.6 million people, over half of Sudanese population, are expected to face high levels of acute food insecurity.

AMY GOODMAN: After over 16 months of fighting, much of Sudan’s healthcare system has also collapsed, leading to the outbreak of disease, including cholera. Massive floods and torrential rains in recent weeks have compounded the catastrophe, with dozens of reported deaths, the further destruction of vital infrastructure and more disruptions to the delivery of lifesaving humanitarian aid.

For more, we’re joined by two guests. Yousra Elbagir is Africa correspondent at Sky News, her latest piece titled “Sudan War: Massacre on the Streets,” part of a joint investigation with Lighthouse Reports, The Washington Post and Le Monde uncovering gruesome details of footage of the June 2023 ethnically motivated massacre of civilians by Rapid Support Forces in North Darfur’s town of Kutum. Their investigation is the first time visual evidence has emerged showing fighters linked with the RSF directly involved in the extrajudicial killings of unarmed civilians. She’s joining us from Nairobi, Kenya.

And in Paris, we’re joined by Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, senior crisis, conflict and arms researcher at Human Rights Watch, which has just released a new report titled “Fanning the Flames: Sudanese Warring Parties’ Access to New Foreign-Made Weapons and Equipment.”

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s go to Yousra first in Nairobi, Kenya. Talk about what’s happening in your home country of Sudan right now, what people should understand about the depth of this catastrophe.

YOUSRA ELBAGIR: Well, Amy, I think everyone can remember the genocide in the early 2000s, 2003 genocide in Darfur, where there was outcry, outrage around the inhumanity that was being seen in the Darfur region, the suppression of people’s voices that was happening in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. There was an outcry and a rejection of the violence happening there. I was in school in Sudan at the time. And though the military regime had completely censored press from speaking on the conflict in Darfur in 2003, we heard from it — from outside. We heard from it — we heard about it from the international community, because the noise about it was so difficult to ignore even in the seat of power in Khartoum.

Now it’s the opposite. Now it is complete apathy and neglect. The global community is essentially turning away, 20 years on, when we have similar atrocities happening in the Darfur region and spreading to the country. I got a message earlier from a source who helped us on the investigation. He asked me if the Western world was complicit, if they’re in on it, because he himself is shocked to see that no one seems to care, that he feels that there’s an aiding and abetting of the RSF through allies of the West, like the UAE. And there just seems to be a lot of confusion and despair about why the world doesn’t seem to be taking this seriously.

AMY GOODMAN: Yousra, I wanted to turn to that joint investigation you just did between Sky News, Lighthouse Reports, The Washington Post and the French paper Le Monde, which uncovers these gruesome details and footage of the June 2023 ethnically motivated massacre of civilians by Rapid Support Forces in North Darfur’s town of Kutum, the investigation marking the first time visual evidence has emerged showing fighters linked with the RSF directly involved in the extrajudicial killing of unarmed civilians. This is a clip of your video report.

YOUSRA ELBAGIR: Safia’s husband was one of the soldiers killed in the battle. But civilian men in her family were targeted, too.

SAFIA: [translated] My three cousins and two of my brothers were stood up and shot dead. My father would have been killed, too, if he hadn’t fled. We had to bury my brothers in the yard with some dirt and leave them behind.

YOUSRA ELBAGIR: Residents say they had never seen anything like it, even compared to the 2003 conflict in Darfur, designated as genocide.

YOUSIF: [translated] This time, these guys conquer the army, and then they come for the civilians. If you have a car, they’ll take it. They’ll take anything in your home. If you have pretty sisters, they’ll rape them.

AMY GOODMAN: You can see the rest of this investigation on Sky News’ website, news.sky.com. Yousra Elbagir, it was your voice that we heard there. You were the correspondent on this investigation. What shocked you most? This was a massacre that took place a year ago. But how much has things changed?

YOUSRA ELBAGIR: Well, we were on the border with West Darfur when the war started, and we were seeing people come out of West Darfur with bullets in them, children. I remember a 3-year-old having a bullet in his hip. And they were being targeted by the Arab militias that the RSF is linked to, based solely on their ethnicity. A couple of days later, this massacre, that we reported on recently, happened, and it was a townwide massacre that spread also to the displacement camp, Kassab, which was actually built to house persecuted communities from the Darfur genocide in the early 2000s. So we had already seen the violence play out, and we saw it live.

But what shocked me, Amy, was the videos, the visual evidence that we put forward in the report, that Lighthouse shared with us, that kind of spurred on this investigation, where these tribal militiamen are celebrating over lifeless bodies of unarmed civilians, saying, “Victory to the Arabs.” They’re cheering on their violence. We spent a lot of time tracking down the victims that we see in those video, tracking down their people closest to them, to understand who they were, what their relationship was with the RSF, why they were being targeted in this way. And they were simply unarmed civilians. We were even told repetitively they don’t have any history of altercation. One of them was a university student. One of them was a cattle herder. One of them was only 14 years old. They were found in a door-to-door hunt of civilian men of fighting age from non-Arab tribes.

So, to see this happen very early on, I started to feel like it was a template for the massacres and the atrocities that we saw in the months that followed, because what happened in that town was that the army garrison was taken over by the RSF, and then they kind of sanctioned this rampage, this massacre on the town. It was the second garrison to fall in Darfur after the RSF kind of took over Khartoum. The first one in Darfur, Kabkabiya, there was very little fight. And this garrison is being credibly accused of being sold out to the RSF. Army soldiers told us that senior commanders colluded with the RSF before the attack. And then, in the months that followed, we see a similar pattern: an abrupt withdrawal from army garrisons, the RSF takes over towns and then starts to carry out atrocities against civilians. And that is terrifying. It’s terrifying because the civilians there are essentially defenseless. The army can’t be trusted to protect civilians, and the RSF is currently in control of four out of five of states in Darfur.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to bring Jean-Baptiste Gallopin into this conversation, senior researcher at Human Rights Watch. If you can tell us more about “Fanning the Flames: Sudanese Warring Parties’ Access to New Foreign-Made Weapons and Equipment.” Where are all these weapons coming from that are killing so many Sudanese civilians?

JEAN-BAPTISTE GALLOPIN: Good morning, Amy. Thanks for having me.

So, you know, at Human Rights Watch, we monitor social media for evidence of crimes. And over the past year, we were shocked to see the growing number of apparently new weapons that the warring parties are using in the conflict, weapons that are kind of very sophisticated pieces of modern equipment and made abroad. So we analyzed this content and identified the equipment and published this report, which presents the equipment that we believe was newly acquired. That includes armed drones, different types of these, of such drones; truck-mounted, multi-barrel rocket launcher systems; explosive munitions; drone jammers; as well as anti-tank guided missiles. And these weapons were made in countries such as Serbia, Russia, China, the UAE and Iran.

And both sides are using them. So we’re very concerned that, in the context of widespread atrocities being carried out in Sudan by both sides, these weapons are very likely to be used to commit human rights violations and war crimes. And we’ve actually found evidence in this report of drones used by the military being used to attack apparent civilians in the Khartoum area.

AMY GOODMAN: And again, name the countries where the weapons are coming from.

JEAN-BAPTISTE GALLOPIN: So, this includes Serbia, Russia, China, Iran, the UAE. And so, we found, for instance, that the Sudanese military is using the Mohajer-6 drone, which is really a latest-generation drone manufactured by the Iranian Ministry of Defense. You know, we found the RSF using attack drones that we couldn’t identify but that are used with — in tandem with thermobaric munitions that crates, weapon crates, show were first purchased by the United Arab Emirates from Serbia, before finding their way to the RSF. And these weapons are used across the country, including in Darfur, but also in the Khartoum area, as well as Kordofan.

And so, that really illustrates that the existing arms embargo on Darfur, which was established in 2004 in the context of the Darfur conflict at the time, is really inadequate in light of the changed situation in the country. As you mentioned, today, the majority of Sudan’s federal states are seeing violence, and there is very little enforcement of this embargo. So, the U.N. Security Council a few days ago voted to renew the embargo, but we actually are calling for the Security Council to expand it to the whole of Sudan to ensure these weapon — to curb the flow of weapons and protect civilians.

AMY GOODMAN: Can I ask, Yousra, why are these countries involved with what’s going on in Sudan right now, this humanitarian catastrophe — Serbia, China, Russia, UAE?

YOUSRA ELBAGIR: I mean, Sudan is — it’s literally a gold mine, Amy. I mean, we’ve got massive gold mines. We’ve got uranium deposits. We’ve got an 800-kilometer Red Sea coastline. We’re also a corridor country. And we are the third-largest country in Africa.

I think the instability in Sudan has been exploited by international powers for a long time. But now it really is kind of up for the taking. I mean, Omar al-Bashir, the former military dictator, made his money selling Sudan for parts. He had already had a deal with Russia before he was ousted in the 2019 revolution. He already had deals with the UAE and Kuwait and Saudi Arabia on kind of corrupt mine — like hundreds of years of leases on arable land. He had kind of set the precedent for making money, making Sudan a lucrative business for kleptocrats.

And so, once he was ousted, the power vacuum was quickly filled with his henchmen, with his inspector general, who is now the army chief. And his opponent, Hemedti, the head of the RSF, was al-Bashir’s favorite militiaman. He led the counterinsurgency in Darfur in the early 2000s as the head of a Janjaweed militia. So these guys have seen what al-Bashir has managed to do with the country, and they’re cashing in on it.

And all of these countries that are involved are definitely exploiting the vulnerability. And some of them had an active hand in suppressing the protests in 2019. I mean, both the UAE and Russia have been credibly accused of helping the government at the time to track down protesters, to lobby online propaganda campaigns, especially Russia. And this is just a continuation of that, I think.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you both for being with us. Of course, we’ll continue to follow this story. Sky News Africa correspondent Yousra Elbagir, speaking to us from Nairobi, Kenya, a Sudanese journalist. And Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, senior crisis, conflict and arms researcher at Human Rights Watch, speaking to us from Paris, France. We’ll link to your reports at Sky News and to the Human Rights Watch investigation.

This is Democracy Now! When we come back, Leonard Peltier turns 80 years old in prison. He’s been there for half a century. Stay with us.