RSF Genocide on Nile Strip: You will Sing for Khartoum in Vain (1-2)

By: Abdullah Ali Ibrahim

Khaled Mustafa Medani, professor of African studies at Canadian McGill University, said that the ongoing war in Sudan is not a civil war. If we describe it well, it is a war against civilians. In his diagnosis of the Sudan war, he agreed with the diagnosis of the Holocaust professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Amos Goldberg, who said in his analysis of Israel’s war in Gaza that we are entering a new phase in the war, which is the war against civilians.
Goldberg reviewed the “genocide” crimes in Germany, Armenia, Rwanda, and Myanmar, concluding that Israel’s aggression against Gaza is a complete “genocide” crime. He said that by releasing his army in Gaza, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant is entering a new phase in the war, which is a war “without civilians.” Military objectives in such a war are secondary to the killing of civilians, meaning that the civilian is permissible and a target for killing. The permissibility of civilian blood in such a war is the logic of “genocide,” and “genocide,” according to Goldberg, is the intentional killing of a group or part of it, not necessarily all of its members. Not every “genocide” that occurs in the world is like the “Holocaust” with its well-known terms such as gas ovens and concentration camps. The absence of these “Holocaust” terms did not prevent the International Court of Justice from convicting the Serbs of “genocide” because they intended to destroy the presence of the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica by killing, expelling them, and destroying their people.
Our political thought did not stop at the type of war crime committed by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) against civilians in Khartoum and Medani, and threatening the Nile and Northern states on the Nile strip. There is no dispute in local and international circles that the war crime that occurred against the Masalit people in Western Darfur is “genocide,” which is another version of the one that occurred to them in 2004, but the thought stops without naming what is happening to civilians in Khartoum and Medani and threatening the two states.
The question did not even arise to the elite of the National and Civil Forces Coordination Movement (Taqaddum), which considered what happened to civilians to be the result of our battle of war, with its dregs and nothing new. Rather, one of them said that “RSF” took over the role of civilians by force, and whoever wanted to expel them should be able to defeat them. Others, including the armed forces, blamed the “RSF” for occupying civilian homes, saying that the latter took refuge in those homes to escape the army’s bombardment with lava from the sky. When the army stopped its attack, RSF would come out of the homes and returned them to their families. Therefore, this intimidation of role is not even a war crime, as long as the army forces forced RSF to commit it.
Although Khaled agreed with Goldberg in diagnosing the state of war today, which is that it is a war against civilians, he did not name the crime that occurs as a result of civilians, our topic here. Khaled’s reason for refraining from specifying this crime is that he sees it as a war between Generals Al-Burhan and Hemedti. Both of them are equal in their aggression against civilians, even though war is a carrier of crimes. The International Criminal Court did not prevent the Serbs from holding the Serbs accountable for “genocide” against the Bosnian Muslims, even though both of them committed other, less serious war crimes. The Hutu people also committed the crime of “genocide” against the Tutsi people. Then they both committed crimes in the war that took place between them from 1990 until their peace agreement in 1993. Then the war broke out between them in 1994 and the burden of “genocide” fell. “Tutsi” to “Hutu”.
The Sudanese army was not free from committing a crime against civilians, or was accused of it, but it was not responsible for the broad, unprovoked aggression against them, as was done by the “RSF.” The US State Department agreed that both parties committed war crimes, but reports indicate that it was the RSF and its allied militias that targeted civilians in an attack that amounts to crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing. At the beginning of this year, a group of Congress representatives submitted a draft resolution to condemn the “RSF” for terrorizing Darfur and committing the “Ginocide.”
It was said that the perpetrator of “Gynoside” was a cold-minded ideologue in the first place and a barbarian in the second place. We did not come across the war discourse after examining the idea behind the barbarism of “RSF” in the complaints of those affected by its aggression against them in Khartoum, Gezira State, and elsewhere. In the discourse of the war, we did not go beyond describing it as a war between two generals who had become greedy for power, or that it was a case of mercenarism predominant in “RSF” or that it was a strife by Kizan or remnants who wanted to restore the Inqaz state, or just an absurd situation whose instigators had no regard or compassion for civilians. For his part, Hemedti sees it as a response to the army’s attack on him, and he promotes his demand that he wants to save Sudan from the Kizan army and establish a civil democratic state. While the army sees it as a rebellion by the “RSF”, which has long been turbaned. These are known levels in war discourse. But we turned a blind eye to speeches on Tik Tok and the media expressing those rising as soldiers in the war, deceiving its cause, or its supporters promoting the claims of its parties. This is the material that may have helped us on the “RSF” side, especially in legalizing the crime that civilians say it committed against them.
Perhaps it occurred to you that what the RSF is committing against civilians in Khartoum and the Gezira, and what awaits the Nile and Northern states, is “genocide” whenever you listen to the recordings of those below its military ladder and those around them, you find that they did not justify their violations in these recordings, but rather they named the group that was the subject of their targeting and historical injustice, a group that has been known throughout its history by different names such as “Northerners” because they are located in the north of the country, or “Jellaba” which is the characteristic of their trade since their early generations, or “Al-Shayqiya” and The “Ja’ali” and “Danagla”, by the names of their tribes on the Middle Nile, or by the names of their capitals such as “Shendi”, “Atbara” and “Merowe”, and Khartoum and Medani are included in this.
We will show that in the next episode