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THE GAURDIAN
Sudan's military leaders accused of ordering massacre

BBC investigation includes testimony from soldiers who attacked peaceful protesters

Ruth Maclean West Africa correspondent

Fri 12 Jul 2019 13.56 BST
Last modified on Fri 12 Jul 2019 18.00 BST

Sudanese people demonstrate in Khartoum to commemorate those who were killed.
Photograph: David Degner/The Guardian

The massacre of peaceful protesters in Sudan last month was ordered by the country’s top military rulers, according to an investigation by BBC Africa Eye.

The documentary Sudan’s Livestream Massacre, which analysed more than 300 videos shot on protesters’ mobiles on the morning of the attack, also included testimony from soldiers who admitted taking part in the break-up of the historic sit-in by thousands of Sudanese civilians.

Protests against the rule of Omar al-Bashir, the long-time president wanted by the international criminal court, started in December. The sit-in in the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, had been going on since April, before it was violently dispersed.

Having prompted the downfall and arrest of al-Bashir, the demonstrators have continued. They demanded a civilian government, the removal of violent militia from cities, aid for those attacked in raids and the release of political prisoners.

Abdel Fattah al-Burhan is officially the head of the transitional military council (TMC), which has agreed a three-year power-sharing deal with the opposition. Most agree, however, that it is his deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who previously ran the notorious government-backed Janjaweed militias, who is in charge.

One of the military officers interviewed by the BBC said Dagalo, who is commonly known as Hemeti, was the person who ordered it.

“The instructions were issued by the commander, Gen Hemeti. We received these instructions on the 20 May,” the BBC reported the captain as saying. “After that, Abdul Rahim Dagalo [another commander] came to see us and he told us to clear the sit-in site, because these people have to be made to flee. For this country to move forward, and for peace to become a reality, we have to deal decisively with all manifestations of chaos.”

Hemeti initially refused to answer questions from the New York Times about the massacre, saying he was waiting for the results of an investigation. In the same interview, however, he said protesters had carried out “unspeakable provocations”, including one who waved his genitals at Sudanese soldiers, and others who allegedly tore apart a military vehicle while filming it. He later said any RSF militiamen found to be involved in abuses would be held accountable.

For more than a month, very little footage from the massacre emerged. As has been the case with many governments in Africa and beyond in the past few years, the TMC ordered an internet shutdown. Only when this was lifted on Wednesday were protesters who filmed the attack able to share their videos.

How investigators will respond to this evidence, whether they will find the TMC responsible and what that means for the power-sharing deal remains to be seen. The signing of the transition deal has been delayed but according to the African Union diplomat Mohammed el-Hassan Labat will take place on Saturday.

In the meantime, a top general announced on Thursday night that a coup attempt by military officers had been foiled and 16 people arrested.

Fri 12 Jul 2019 13.56 BST
Last modified on Fri 12 Jul 2019 18.00 BST
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The interim vice president, Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo, was in charge of the brutal janjaweed militias. Now he is calling the shots in Khartoum.

By Jérôme Tubiana

May 14, 2019, 2:34 PM

Gen. Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo, the deputy head of Sudan’s military council, speaks at a news conference in Khartoum on April 30. Associated Press
After Omar al-Bashir was deposed on April 11, Western diplomats made no mistake about who was in charge. Ambassadors from the United States, Britain, and the European Union did not shake hands with the transitional military council’s president, the little known army general Abdel Fattah al-Burhan; they met with his younger deputy Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known by the nickname “Hemeti.”
The story of how an uneducated 40-something chief of the janjaweed—the Arab militias that brought death and destruction to Darfur 16 years ago—became more powerful than his seasoned mentors in the Sudanese junta is, to many, a mystery.
In fact, Hemeti is the main legacy of Bashir’s 30-year rule. Bashir himself was a product of an alliance of the army and the Muslim Brotherhood, unseen elsewhere in the Arab world, but the army grew tired of the wars it had to fight in Sudan’s south, and the Islamists fragmented. When a new war began in Darfur in 2003, Bashir was convinced by Darfuri Arab hard-liners that turning their youths to militias would allow him to win. But by creating the janjaweed and relentlessly empowering them under Hemeti, the Sudanese regime has created a monster it cannot control and who represents a security threat not only for Sudan but also for its neighbors.
By creating the janjaweed and relentlessly empowering them under Hemeti, the Sudanese regime has created a monster it cannot control
It seems that for a few days after Bashir’s ousting Khartoum’s civilian opposition trusted that it could negotiate a civilian transition with Burhan and Hemeti. Darfuris were more skeptical, given that they were more intimately familiar with the new men in charge. Burhan was a military intelligence colonel coordinating army and militia attacks against civilians in West Darfur state from 2003 to 2005, at a time when Hemeti was already a known warlord, who would gradually become the janjaweed’s primary leader. During its first, most intense years, the war in Darfur led to the deaths of several hundred thousand non-Arab civilians and displaced about 2 million people, earning Bashir an arrest warrant for genocide from the International Criminal Court.
I met Hemeti a couple of times in 2009, first in a vaguely Orientalist furniture shop he owned in South Darfur’s state capital of Nyala (one of his early business efforts), from which I was driven to a more private office setting. He was a tall man with the sarcastic smile of a naughty child—yet he was then the newly appointed security advisor to South Darfur’s governor, his first official government position, obtained through blackmail and threats of rebellion.
Hemeti hails from a small Chadian Arab clan that fled wars and drought in Chad to take refuge in Darfur in the 1980s. As he told me, his uncle Juma Dagalo failed to be recognized as a tribal leader in North Darfur state, but South Darfur authorities welcomed the newcomers and allowed them to settle on land belonging to the Fur tribe, Darfur’s main indigenous non-Arab group. The place, called Dogi in the Fur language, was rebranded Um-el-Gura, “the mother of the villages” in Arabic, an old name for Mecca. The authorities also armed Dagalo’s followers, who, as early as the 1990s, began attacking their Fur neighbors.
Hemeti was then a teenager who, as he told me, dropped out of primary school in the third grade to trade camels across the borders in Libya and Egypt. When the Darfur rebellion began in 2003, he became a janjaweed amir (war chief) in his area, leading attacks against neighboring Fur villages. To justify joining the government-backed militias, he said the rebels had attacked a caravan of fellow camel traders on their way to Libya, allegedly killing 75 men and #####ng 3,000 camels. That fell short of his own brutal record as a militia leader.
In 2006, armed with new equipment, he led several hundred men on a raid across the rebel-held area of North Darfur. The janjaweed rammed non-Arab men with their pickup trucks and raped women in the name of jihad—according to witnesses I met at the time.
In 2006, armed with new equipment, he led several hundred men on a raid across the rebel-held area of North Darfur. The janjaweed rammed non-Arab men with their pickup trucks and raped women in the name of jihad—according to witnesses I met at the time.
His violent methods even created tensions with accompanying army officers.
At the same time, Chad and Sudan began a proxy war through their respective rebel groups. The Chadian government used its own Arab officials to push the janjaweed to betray Khartoum. Bichara Issa Jadallah, a cousin to Hemeti, was then the defense minister in Chad. In 2006, he invited the janjaweed leader to the Chadian capital, N’Djamena, and had him sign a secret nonaggression pact with the Darfur rebel Justice and Equality Movement, behind the back of Khartoum.
Shortly afterward, Hemeti announced that he had become a rebel. He then received a visit from a TV crew working for Britain’s Channel 4, which shot a documentary in his camp—his first exposure to TV—a medium to which he has become addicted since. But the journalists reportedly came late, and, as they were filming, government negotiators were also in the camp, bargaining over the price to bring Hemeti back into the government fold.