The Cameron Hudson Interview (Full Transcript)
The longtime Sudan policy expert explains the unfolding calamity in Darfur
Note to readers: A systematic and organized campaign of ethnic cleansing is underway in Darfur and the outside world is barely paying attention. We will change that. Global Dispatches will bear witness to the unfolding crisis in Darfur even as it is far from the headlines of most western outlets. We will offer original reporting, and give you the analysis and context you need to understand this crisis as it unfolds through a series we are calling Darfur Genocide Watch. To access this series and support our work, become a paid subscriber.
In 2003 a militia drawn from ethnic Arab tribes in Darfur known as the Janjaweed partnered with the government of Sudan in a genocidal campaign against non-Arab tribes in the region. An estimated 300,000 people were killed in the 2003-2004 Darfur genocide. The Janjaweed have since rebranded as the Rapid Support Forces, the RSF. And in August 2023, there is mounting evidence the RSF is embarking on a campaign of ethnic cleansing in Darfur. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum is warning that there is risk of a full blown genocide.
“What we are seeing now is the RSF and allied Arab militias beginning a campaign of extreme violence and even ethnic cleansing, certainly in parts of West Darfur largely targeting Masalit communities there.” Cameron Hudson, a former CIA Intelligence Analyst and State Department official now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies tells me in a podcast interview. “We’re hearing reports of destruction of villages, seeing satellite imagery again of burning villages. We’re discovering mass graves to the extent that people have access to the region…villages being entirely wiped out by these militia attacks…A lot of the same elements that we saw 20 years ago are replicating themselves again — the same victims in many cases and the same perpetrators”
We kick off discussing the available evidence we have that there is an ongoing campaign of ethnic cleansing underway in Darfur. Cameron Hudson then explains how the genocidal Janjaweed militia became the Rapid Support Forces, which are carrying out these atrocities while battling for control of the whole of Sudan in a full blown civil war that began in April. We discuss how the Rapid Support Forces funds its operations, and the support it is receiving from the United Arab Emirates.
The full episode is available wherever you listen to podcasts. The full transcript is available for paying subscribers.
What is Happening in Darfur Today?
Mark Leon Goldberg So, Cameron, to kick off, what do we know about attacks against civilians in Darfur that seem to be occurring at an increasing clip in recent weeks? Can you describe what's been happening on the ground?
Cameron Hudson I think we're back to the point of having a full blown war in Darfur, not dissimilar to what we saw nearly 20 years ago when the Darfur crisis came onto the international agenda for the first time. We are seeing attacks by the Rapid Support Forces, the militia group that's fighting the south in Khartoum. Their stronghold has always been in Darfur. And what we are seeing now is the RSF and allied Arab militias beginning a campaign of extreme violence and even ethnic cleansing, certainly in parts of West Darfur, largely targeting Masalit communities there. But I think also a generalized violent campaign against civilians across the board. We're hearing reports of destruction of villages, seeing satellite imagery again, of burning villages. We're discovering mass graves to the extent that people have access to the region, a number of mass graves of villages being entirely wiped out by these militia attacks. Obviously, there's a heightened amount of sexual violence associated with this. We're seeing children targeted, we're seeing elderly targeted. And of course, we're seeing widespread looting associated with all of this violence. And I guess the last element is the sort of cleansing part of it, where we're seeing now over 100,000 people leaving Darfur in west Darfur, primarily for Chad. So a lot of the same elements that we saw again 20 years ago are replicating themselves again, the same victims in many cases and the same perpetrators.
Mark Leon Goldberg You mentioned the SAF. This is the Sudanese armed Forces that is the other protagonist in the Sudanese civil war that's fighting the RSF, the Rapid Support Forces. I'd like to dive a little deeper into the ethnic element of this. You mentioned that the Masalit community is primarily the victims thus far of this incipient ethnic cleansing campaign that we are seeing. Who are the Masalit? And can you describe more broadly like the ethnic dimensions of this and why it is important to understand what's driving this conflict?
Cameron Hudson The Masalit are one of the principal tribes in Darfur. They are on the western side of Darfur. And so there are many Masalit in Chad as well. Again, there's no real national boundary to tribal disbursement in this area. Interestingly, we are not seeing attacks on the Fur population, for example, or some of the other African populations targeted 20 years ago when the Janjaweed were originally activated. But again, I think that we are seeing some elements of parallels here in the sense that it is Arab tribes that are committing much of the violence against these communities right now in Darfur.
Mark Leon Goldberg And the Masalit are not Arab. The RSF is the successor to the Janjaweed, which was an ethnic Arab militia that was tapped by the former government of Sudan to kind of do the dirty work on the ground, resulting in the genocide that we saw 20 years ago. What are you hearing from your contacts, your interlocutors on the ground in Darfur, in terms of who is perpetrating these assaults? And is it the RSF directly? Is it groups affiliated with the RSF? What's the general conflict dynamic that you're seeing in Darfur right now?
Cameron Hudson Certainly, it's hard to say. There's a great deal of access issues that we are facing right now in terms of getting real eyewitness accounts. And there's been very little effort, I think, internationally, to document the crimes that are occurring there, certainly not like we saw 20 years ago. So there is certainly a kind of fog of war that pervades this conflict. That being said, there are some eyewitness accounts that have been taken by human rights groups on the Chadian side of the border which confirm that some of the perpetrators are wearing uniforms and so have been identified as such. But there are also many perpetrators not in uniform and who are associated with the RSF tribally. But again, we don't have right now the same kind of awareness of the perpetrators. Like we did 20 years ago. And I think that's primarily because 20 years ago this was a state directed assault on this population. It wasn't an indigenous war in Darfur. It was being directed by central government authorities in Khartoum. and so there was a pattern to the violence in Darfur because it was instigated in the first part by Sudan's army, by the Sudan Armed Forces. And it was done in conjunction with and they directed the activities of the Janjaweed on the ground. And so there was a pattern of violence that we could map and discern in ways that allowed us to document more easily, understand the perpetrators more easily. And of course, the central government was making statements about what they were doing. They didn't see it as genocide. They saw it as putting down an armed rebellion. And so there was just a lot more documentation about what was going on...So it's a very different set of facts surrounding the violence. And that makes it harder, I think, to pinpoint exactly who was doing what to whom and for what motivation right now.
How the Janjaweed Became the Rapid Support Forces
Mark Leon Goldberg So can you explain briefly how the RSF came to be and its leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemeti. What is his and the RSF's connection to the genocide of 2003?
Cameron Hudson The SAF was responding to an uprising of Darfuri rebel groups in the early 2000.
Mark Leon Goldberg And this is the Sudanese Armed Forces.
Cameron Hudson This is the Sudanese Armed Forces. And I think, you know, a lot of this going back in the history there was a North-South civil war that was going on. And at that time, there were advanced talks going on in Naivasha, Kenya, around resolving that North-South civil war. And it was looking like the Southerners at that time were going to gain some amount of autonomy, some amount of revenue sharing from the central government. And that in part spurred Darfuri rebel groups, which were equally disenfranchized by the central government to start a rebellion in Darfur, famously attacking a SAF base in Darfur, destroying several airplanes and killing staff officers. This was a real blow to the Army's seeming invincibility. And so they responded with a very, very heavy handed approach to trying to eradicate the Darfur rebellion out of fear and in frankness because they thought it could replicate what the Southerners had achieved in their North-South civil war. But after a short period of time, I think the SAF realized that they were not set up to really be able to impose their will over such a vast area in Darfur. This is an area that doesn't have a lot of roads where you see difficulty during the rainy season, which is going on right now, traversing these areas. Darfur is the size of Texas, so it's a massive area to have to patrol and it requires a lot of mobility and agility, something that the SAF did not have. It was made up largely of heavy weaponry, heavy artillery, heavy armored vehicles that just don't move around very easily in those conditions. And so the army then activated a kind of militia group, not unlike what they had done, again, in South Sudan, where they had a series of militias popularly known as the Popular Defense Forces. The Janjaweed were something akin to that, essentially an assemblage of Arab tribesmen who had already been active in that area. They were given weapons, they were given money, and they were importantly given promises of future lands and future governing possibilities. And so the military really activated them as a kind of mobile fighting force. And you saw during that time, the military and the Janjaweed really acting in concert to carry out these crimes where the military would pick targets, where they knew that there were pockets of rebel activity. They would either launch bombers to target the villages where they were hiding or launch long range artillery. And then you would see the Janjaweed come in on horseback or camel and essentially do clean up operations on the ground. Now, that said, because they were on the ground, because the RSF or the Janjaweed, then we're doing these clean up operations, they were really responsible for the worst kinds of violence, the rape, the looting, the burning of villages, the destroying of. Wells and other civilian infrastructure. That was all on on the Janjaweed. As you fast forward through the war in Darfur. As the war begins to die down, as there are so many people that have either been killed already or they've been displaced. The Janjaweed is left looking back to the central government to fulfill the promises that it had made. They want their money, they want their lands, they want their autonomy and their governance. And that's not something that the Bashir regime is able to deliver on at that time. But what it can do is it can give them uniforms and it can give them a kind of a more formal role in the state security structure. And so you see the Janjaweed transform from this kind of ragtag militia to part of the national security architecture and become the rapid support forces. And they are given a number of jobs related to things like border security and the like. And so that continues for a number of years. The head of the Janjaweed during the Darfur genocide, a guy named Moussa Hilal, is indicted by the International Criminal Court. And so General Dagalo Hemmati assumes control of the RSF. And he's an interesting figure that's been written about him and spoken about him. But what I would just point out is that he was a very entrepreneurial figure. And so coming to the head of the RSF at the time that he did, he, I think, really saw the potential for this force to be more than just a Darfur enforcement mechanism. And he used his business acumen and his political connections to hire out the RSF. And this actually suited the Bashir government perfectly well at the time, because Bashir was, of course, always worried that various elements of his security services would potentially at some point pose a threat to his personal hold on power. And so the idea of having a force that he could loan out and hire out to allied governments in the region that also got them out of the country and made it so that they were not a threat to his personal hold on power was a good thing for him. And so that was also a good thing for him because at the time he was able to send his forces to Libya and to Yemen and to obviously become fabulously wealthy at that time, but also create his own kind of foreign relations and develop deeper ties to people like Haftar in Libya and to the leadership in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates for whom he was working in Yemen. And so you see this evolution, therefore, in the 2010s of the RSF from a very ragtag militia group to a really formidable fighting force that had cut its teeth, not just in this local conflict in Sudan, but in some of the biggest wars in the region, working for some of the deepest pockets in the region. And he used that money. He used those relationships to both buy power and influence back home, buying up land, buying access to gold mines and other commercial interests, but also use that money to buy an army to graduate from kind of Toyota technicals to more armor, heavier weapons, really creating a fighting force that now as we see rivals the potency of Sudan's national army.
How the RSF is Supported by the UAE
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