2023-08-03 08:02:02
CAIRO (AP) — Warring sides in Sudan have committed numerous war crimes in the ongoing conflict, including the deliberate killing of civilians and sexual assaults, a leading human rights group said Thursday.
The East African country was plunged into chaos in mid-April, when tensions between the army and a powerful paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (FAR), which had started months earlier, escalated into an open battle in the capital, Khartoum, and other parts of the country.
In a 56-page report, Amnesty International said civilians were killed and injured in targeted attacks. In addition, he denounced rapes of women, some of them held in conditions “equivalent to sexual slavery”, mainly in the capital and in the western region of Darfur.
“Sexual violence has been a defining element of this conflict from the beginning,” Donatella Rovera, a co-author of the report, told The Associated Press. “Civilians haven’t really got any good alternatives. It’s hard for them to leave and incredibly dangerous to stay.”
Almost all cases of rape have been attributed to the FAR and allied Arab militias. According to the report, the FAR kidnapped 24 women and girls, some as young as 12, and held them “for days in which they were raped by various members” of the group.
Rovera indicated that war crimes such as sexual assaults were taking place “on what appears to be a large scale.”
The FAR, which grew out of the notorious Janjaweed militia, was also accused of most of the targeted attacks, according to Amnesty. Some crimes are also attributed to members of the military, the report added.
Responding to the report, the army said it had created a unit to try to reduce harm to the civilian population, while the FAR denied allegations of sexual violence, as well as disclaiming responsibility for the violence in West Darfur.
The conflict has turned Khartoum and other urban areas into battlefields. Darfur — which was the scene of a genocidal war in the early 2000s — saw some of the worst violence, and recent clashes have turned into ethnic clashes.
The fighting has forced some four million people to flee their homes, either to safer areas inside Sudan or to neighboring countries, according to the United Nations migration agency.
The violence in Darfur was blamed mainly on the FAR and its allies who, according to Amnesty, attacked the African Masalit community in the region. The report also indicated that Masalit gunmen had allegedly attacked Arabs suspected of supporting the militias.
Amnesty detailed waves of violence in West Darfur — one of the five provinces that make up the Darfur region — including killings of civilians, looting and destruction of homes and facilities such as the main hospital and markets.
The Amnesty International report was the last to document the atrocities in the Sudanese conflict.
Last month, Human Rights Watch asked the International Criminal Court to investigate the situation in Darfur, including the “summary executions” of around three dozen non-Arab tribesmen in a town in the region.
The UN Human Rights Office said a mass grave was found on the outskirts of the town of Geneina with at least 87 bodies, citing credible information. And ICC prosecutor Karim Khan told the UN Security Council in July that he was investigating alleged new war crimes and crimes against humanity in Darfur.
“There are complaints that it could be ethnic cleansing,” Rovera said. “The situation is very complicated, very dangerous, because it could get worse.”
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