Today, right now, at this precise moment, the troops have the city surrounded. The attack is imminent. Of the nearly one million people inside, many are refugees from places that the same troops have already razed. The precedents indicate 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… it must be Kharkiv, the city in Ukraine where the Russian troops are approaching?
neither Neither Rafah nor Kharkiv. We are talking about Al-Fashir, a city in Darfur, in the south-west of Sudan, a region inhabited by the most terrorized human beings in the world.
Yeah, yeah I know, dear readers. you go away To another column, to another section of the newspaper. Minimal desire to continue reading. Very few are interested in this. And, yes, clear. i see it What I aspire to is to be read to me, and that is why I have thought about it several times before choosing to write a column about a place that not all of us could identify on the map.
Why have I chosen to focus today on the horrors of the civil war in Sudan? Why not play it safe and talk to you, as I had been thinking, about the ridiculousness of the woke movement, focusing on the story of a woman in England of Japanese descent who sued a woman from ‘Anglo-Saxon origin for having asked him if he liked sushi? Or, another option that was on the table, reflect in the wake of the attack this week against the Slovak Prime Minister on the dangers that the happy “polarization” represents for democracy and for peace?
I confess: I chose Sudan more out of selfishness than journalism. Not thinking of the public who pay money to read this newspaper, but as an exercise in personal therapy, to ease my conscience. Today I offer you neither soup nor meat nor chocolate cake. I offer you medicine, the kind that tastes so bad it makes us close our eyes and make faces of disgust.
So let’s go. To the masoques who continue here, I present to you a Sudanese general of Arab origin named 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 with 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 Hemeti leads 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, of non-Arab but African ethnic groups. It turns out that the Sudanese civil war has a significant and undisguised element of racism. The warriors of Hemeti have a habit of referring to their victims as, among other things, “slaves”, which many indeed were until recently (News to some: racism is not only practiced by people white-skinned; slavery was not the exclusive monopoly of Western empires).
I started catching up on the barbarism in Sudan after reading an extensive report this week by the human rights organization Human Rights Watch. Then I skimmed through a dozen articles in rather remote places on the web, and on Friday I spoke 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 houses and raping women in Geneina, the capital of West 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 piled up the children and shot them. They threw their bodies into the river.” There are echoes here of a genocide whose details I know well, that of Rwanda in 1994.
Here are some figures 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, go hungry, and five million are close to starvation (Many have no choice but to compete with the goats and eat pasture). In the last 30 years of almost permanent conflicts in Sudan, it is estimated that around 2.4 million have died, due to violence or malnutrition, which is 15 times more than in the Israel-Palestine conflicts since 1948.
The UN official told me, in despair, that for the few outside Sudan who care, the focus today is on Al-Fashir, surrounded by General Hemeti’s exterminating troops. As in Rafah, the UN 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 US ambassador to the United Nations warns that Al-Fashir is “on the brink of an enormous massacre”.
what to do More forceful statements, from more countries, perhaps? A little pressure on those who supply arms to the parties to the conflict, like Iran to General Al-Burhan’s troops or (although they deny it) the United Arab Emirates to Hemeti’s? There is plenty of evidence against UEA, 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 Al-Fashir?
Now. I know. It’s asking a lot. What it must have been like to get here, the end of this column. Thanks. We have done something, if only to recognize that no man is an island, that bells ring for all.
