Newsflash
How many warning do you need to avert a massacre?
This week again warnings were issued by international bodies, they said that the widespread atrocities which took place during the fight for El Fasher in October will be repeated in El Obeid, Kadugli and Dilling in Kordofan, cities being besieged by the Rapid Suport Forces, in collaboration with fighters from the Nuba Mountains.
“ It is is the same pattern of violence”, said after a visit to Sudan UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk in Nairobi during a press conference I attended. “It is a war crime, it could be a crime against humanity”, he said about the strangulation and starvation of these cities.
Volker Türk further said:
“ War has plunged the country into an abyss of unfathomable proportions because it affects all of the country, all of the people.
I met Hawa(not her real name), who was working towards her Masters Degree in Psychology when she had to flee El Fasher after losing her 19-year-old son due to shelling. En route, she recounted that she was looted, beaten, and her husband was abducted, detained and tortured by RSF, who demanded a ransom of 10 million Sudanese Pounds (USD 2,860).
So many provided testimony of detained, disappeared and missing family members and friends. One woman saw her husband and only son killed. She is still bedridden from grief, trauma, and the bullet she took in her shoulder while trying – in vain – to shield her son.
The commanders of this conflict, and those who are arming, funding and profiting from this war, need to hear what 20-year-old Aisha(not her real name), now in Al-Afad, told me. In her words:
On 20 October, we were fleeing from El Fasher on a donkey cart. It was the only transport we could afford. On the road to Garni village, there were lots of dead bodies. We saw armed men on camels who said « bring down the women ». My brother tried to stop them. They shot him in his legs. My mother started crying and said « leave my children, take me instead of her ». They hit her, took me and told me to keep quiet or they will kill my mother. Then what happened…happened. My period has not come since then.”
Briefing ambassadors, Deputy Prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan of the International Criminal Court(ICC) said the situation in Darfur had “darkened even further,” with civilians subjected to what she described as collective torture amid a widening war between Sudan’s rival military forces.
“Atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur region are spreading from town to town in an organized campaign of violence that includes mass executions, rape and ethnic targeting, amounting to war crimes and crimes against humanity”, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court told the UN Security Council on Monday.
“The picture that is emerging is appalling: organised, widespread, mass criminality including mass executions,” Ms. Khan said. “Atrocities are used as a tool to assert control.”
Sudan Dispatch wrote this week about the situation in Kordofan:
“Civilians fleeing the besieged city of Kadugli risk being extorted, ethnically targeted, and killed, according to one who has escaped the city, while those still trapped face hunger, soaring prices, and a critical lack of medical supplies.
Kadugli is one of three cities in the Kordofan region – along with Dilling and El Obeid to its north – currently held by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) but being targeted by the allied Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N).
Kordofan, which sits in the central south of Sudan, has become the epicentre of the conflict over recent months, and capturing its major cities would be a significant step for the RSF as it seeks to expand its territorial control.”
It is a new disaster foretold. Part of a chronology of cruelties, as Volker said.
Pictures MSF