It’s Time to Invoke The Responsibility to Protect in Sudan
Genocide looms
By Mark J. Wood, Refugees International
When war broke out in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, in April 2023, those of us who know the region well feared what would happen to the west, in Darfur. In 2003, former Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir called on the Janjaweed Arab militia to quell an uprising in Darfur. The systematic raping, pillaging, looting, and scorched-earth tactics of the Janjaweed led to the deaths of more than 300,000 people in what has been recognized as a genocide.
The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of today, which is battling the Sudanese Armed Forces for control of the country, traces its origins to the Janjaweed of 20 years ago. The rise of ethnically targeted violence in the region now threatens a recurrence of that dark chapter. Experts and organizations from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to the UN’s Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide are once again warning of genocide.
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