Today, right now, at this precise moment, the troops have the city surrounded. The attack is imminent. Of the almost million people inside, many are refugees from places that the same troops have already devastated. The record indicates that thousands of civilians – men, women and children – will suffer atrocious and indiscriminate deaths.
Where are we talking about? From Rafah? From the Palestinian city in Gaza that the Israelis threaten to pulverize? Well no. So… could it be Kharkiv, the city in Ukraine that Russian troops are approaching?
Neither. Neither Rafah nor Kharkiv. We are talking about El Fasher, a city in Darfur, in the southwest of Sudan, a region inhabited by the most terrified human beings in the world.
Yes, yes. I know, dear readers. They leave me. To another column, to another section of the newspaper. Minimal desire to continue reading. Very few are interested in this. And, yes, of course. I see. What I aspire to is to be read, and that is why I thought several times before choosing to write a column about a place that not all of us could identify on the map.
Why have I decided to focus today on the horrors of the civil war in Sudan? Why not go straight and tell them, as I had been thinking, about the ridiculousness of the woke movement, focusing on the story of a woman in England of Japanese origin who sued a woman of Anglo-Saxon origin in court for racism for having asked if he liked sushi? Or, another option that was on the table, was to reflect, following the attack this week against the Slovak Prime Minister, on the dangers that the happy “polarization” represents for democracy and peace?
I confess: I have chosen Sudan more out of selfishness than journalism. Not thinking about the public that pays money to read this newspaper, but as an exercise in personal therapy, to appease my conscience. Today I don’t offer you soup or meat or chocolate cake. I offer them medicine, the kind that tastes so bad that it makes us close our eyes and look disgusted.
Ok let’s go. To the Masocas who are still here, I present a Sudanese general of Arab origin called Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemeti. He is the leader of the Rapid Support Forces, a curious name for one of the two sides in the civil war that broke out a year ago at a cost, such is the chaos and exhaustion in Sudan, of no one knows how many lives. It could be 15,000. It could be 100,000. Or maybe more.
What we do seem to know is that the forces led by Hemeti are even more bloodthirsty than the official Sudanese armed forces led by his rival, also an Arab general, named Abdel Fattah al Burhan. It is a pure and personal power struggle, clean of any cause or ideology or social proposal (a bit like politics these days in advanced countries like Spain or the United States).
In both cases the main victims are black civilians, not of Arab but African ethnicities. It turns out that the Sudanese civil war has an important and undisguised point of racism. Hemeti warriors have the habit of referring to their victims, among other things, as “slaves,” which many actually were until not long ago (news to some: racism is not only practiced by white-skinned people; slavery It was not the exclusive monopoly of the Western empires).
I started catching up on the barbarism in Sudan after reading an extensive report this week by the human rights body Human Rights Watch. I then combed through a dozen articles in rather remote parts of the web and spoke on Friday with a senior UN official in charge of distributing international humanitarian aid.
A typical example of the dozens of atrocities listed by Human Rights Watch: In the course of burning buildings, looting homes, and raping women in El Geneina, the capital of Western Darfur, General Hemeti’s troops entered a small clinic a few months ago. improvised and killed 23 of the 25 patients. One woman survived, terribly injured; a man too, savagely tortured.
Another, more generic example, reported by witnesses: “First they killed the men, then the women and finally they rounded up the children and shot them. “They threw their bodies into the river.” Echoes here of a genocide whose details I know well, that of Rwanda in 1994.
Here are some numbers from the UN: eight million Sudanese have had to leave their homes; 20 million children cannot go to school; 18 million, more than a third of the population, are hungry, and five million are on the brink of famine (Many have no choice but to compete with goats and eat grass). In the last 30 years of almost permanent conflicts in Sudan, it is estimated that some 2.4 million have died, due to violence or malnutrition, about 15 times more than in the Israel-Palestine conflicts since 1948.
The UN official told me, desperately, that for the few outside Sudan who are interested, the focus today is on El Fasher, surrounded by General Hemeti’s exterminating troops. As in Rafah, the United Nations has made its pious statements and the United States has called for a pause in evacuating civilians, but Hemeti pays even less attention to them than Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. The United States ambassador to the UN warns that El Fasher is “on the precipice of a huge massacre.”
To do? More stronger statements, from more countries, perhaps? A little pressure on those who supply weapons to the parties in the conflict, such as Iran to those of General Al Burhan or (although they deny it) the United Arab Emirates to Hemeti? There is plenty of evidence against the UAE, the owners of Manchester City, a football team that will almost certainly be crowned champions of England today. Perhaps the City players or the fans at the Etihad Stadium could offer some gesture of solidarity with those about to die at El Fasher?
Already. I know. Is it too much to ask. As it will have been to get here, the end of this column. Thank you. We have done something, if only to recognize that no man is an island, that the bells ring for everyone.
