ETHNIC CLEANSING IN DARFUR

A new genocide in Darfur is going largely unnoticed by the global community. Six months into Sudan’s ‘forgotten’ civil war, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and Arab militias - amid recent gains in the country’s West - have embarked on a campaign of ethnically-motivated killings, with the region’s Masalit community among those being singled out.

El Geneina, Darfur’s capital, has fallen to the RSF, and civilians are paying a high price. The RSF is accused of shelling internally displaced people’s camps alongside military targets.

Darfur was already scarred by the 2003 genocide, when Khartoum used the Janjaweed militia (the RSF’s predecessor) to quell protests in the region triggered by political and economic marginalisation. The violence spiralled into a genocide that killed 300,000 and displaced two million. The new war and latest bout of ethnic cleaning has seen another half-million Darfurians flee to neighbouring Chad.

The RSF and the Sudanese Army are currently in Saudi Arabia for talks on humanitarian access, but a ceasefire seems out of reach.