WASHINGTON (CN) — Women shackled and sold into slavery. Girls held hostage and sexually tortured. Hospitals looted and burned.
The scenes occur daily in Sudan’s Darfur region, activists say, and international players must do more to stop the violence.
“It should not be this way,” said Niemat Ahmadi, president of the Darfur Women Action Group. “We should have seen outrage around the world.”
Refugees International, a Washington, D.C.-based humanitarian organization, gathered activists Tuesday to shine a spotlight on violence in Darfur and call for stronger international focus on the conflict in Sudan.
At least 9,000 people have been killed, more than 5.6 million driven from their homes and 25 million have been in need of aid since conflict broke out April 15 between the Sudanese Army and the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary.
The crisis has faded from headlines and political willpower in the United States as the Biden administration has loudly and persistently focused on the war in Ukraine and the recent escalation of violence in Israel and Palestine.
“Our leaders are turning a blind eye because there’s no outrage, there’s no voices,” Ahmadi said.
A recent study estimated more people are in need from the conflict in Sudan than in Ukraine, but the latter receives much more international support.
“It is dire and the response does not match the need on the ground,” said Abdullahi Halakhe, Refugees International’s senior advocate for East and Southern Africa.
In a statement to Courthouse News, a State Department spokesperson repeated international calls “for the parties to immediately end fighting” and respect human rights. The spokesperson highlighted efforts by Secretary of State Antony Blinken with regional and international governmental organizations to build “a broad international consensus calling on the two parties to uphold a ceasefire, protect civilians, and allow unhindered humanitarian access. ”
“We continue to engage civilian leaders working to chart a new process for a democratic transition to civilian rule,” the spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We support inclusive and transparent processes that represent the full diversity of the Sudanese people, including civil society, resistance committees, the peripheries, youth, and women.”
The spokesperson did not answer a question about the capacity of the U.S. to manage the crisis in Sudan while focusing on Ukraine and Israel.
The White House and National Security Council did not return requests for comment.
The bloodshed has origins in a 2019 popular uprising which, once the army and RSF intervened, led to the ouster of President Omar al-Bashir, an authoritarian ruler who held power for 30 years.
The army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and RSF, controlled by Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, shared power in a transitional government with civilians for two years. Hemedti and al-Burhan ousted the civilians in 2021.
Western governments negotiated a transition to democracy, but a power struggle over the integration of the RSF into the military broke out on April 15.
While fighting in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, is closer to a conventional battle against opposing forces, Quscondy Abdulshafi, senior regional advisor on Africa for Freedom House, said the situation in the rest of the country is more complex.
The army and RSF have been accused of committing atrocities in the assemblage of areas they control.
“This is not a case of civil war,” Ahmadi said. “It’s the powerful who are going after the powerless.”
The RSF controls most of Darfur because it evolved out of the janjaweed Arab militias recruited by al-Bashir to brutally suppress an uprising that resulted in the infamous Darfur genocide, which generated a worldwide outcry. That violence has continued, Abdulshafi said, and requires a similar international mobilization.
“When you come to Darfur, it is the RSF ethnically cleansing groups,” he said.
Hala Al-Karib, regional director of the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, said al-Burhan and Hemedti have continued a pattern of atrocities dating before the uprising and have not been held accountable.
“It’s an accumulation of layers upon layers of impunity and enabling perpetrators and sometimes rewarding perpetrators and giving them a sense of being invincible,” she said. “Many of us turned a blind eye and let Sudan down.”
Abdulshafi, a native of Darfur, said the RSF first targeted internet and telecommunications infrastructure to cut off access to the outside world. The group has looted and burned hospitals, banks and markets and confiscated phones and cameras, he said, and some are demanding protection payments of $50,000 a week.
“All the things these people have to survive are being taken,” he said. “The situation is very dire. I don’t know how to explain in words. I can’t find the real words to describe.”
Women are being particularly targeted with widespread sexual violence. Ahmadi said the RSF and army are carrying out a “barbaric and systematic attack directed against women.”
“It is the most dangerous place to be a woman regardless of where you are,” she said.
Ahmadi criticized international mediators who have not included civilians, particularly women, in negotiations to bring the conflict to an end.
“Unfortunately they made it about the generals. It’s not about the people of Sudan,” she said. “In negotiations about security issues, women are excluded. But when security breaks down, women are the most impacted.”
This month, the United Nations Human Rights Council narrowly approved a yearlong fact-finding mission to study allegations of human rights abuses in the conflict. The U.S., which was joined by Norway and the United Kingdom in proposing the mission, has provided more than $840 million in humanitarian aid in the current fiscal year in response to the conflict.
“This historic action by the council is especially important as reports of atrocities and other abuses continue, such as conflict-related sexual violence, ethnically motivated killings, and burning of villages in Darfur and elsewhere,” the State Department said in a press release Tuesday.
Abdulshafi and Ahmadi, however, said the U.N. needs to go further to protect civilians and ensure humanitarian aid reaches those in need. A U.N. peacekeeping mission, which peaked at more than 15,000 personnel, was stationed in Darfur from 2007 to 2020.
“You need something on the ground for those investigations to happen and hold those responsible for their egregious crimes before we can talk about the political situation,” Abdulshafi said.
Abdulshafi added that without civilian protection, the political turmoil cannot be solved.
“In this situation, people are living every hour as if it’s the last hour of their life,” he said. “They are thinking about how to survive an hour. There’s no way anyone is thinking of anything else when your kids, your family can be endangered at any moment.”
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