Briefing ambassadors, ICC Deputy Prosecutor Nazhat Shameem Khan mentioned the scenario in Darfur had “darkened even additional,” with civilians subjected to what she described as collective torture amid a widening warfare between Sudan’s rival navy forces.
“The image that’s rising is appalling: organised, widespread, mass criminality together with mass executions,” Ms. Khan mentioned. “Atrocities are used as a software to claim management.”
Epicentre of ‘profound struggling’
Sudan has been engulfed in battle since April 2023, when preventing erupted between former allies the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Speedy Help Forces militia (RSF).
What started as an influence wrestle metastasised into conflicts throughout the nation, most devastating within the Darfur area, which additionally noticed longstanding ethnic tensions – which prompted allegations of genocide within the early 2000s – being reignited.
She mentioned the autumn of North Darfur’s regional capital El Fasher to the RSF had been adopted by a “calculated marketing campaign of essentially the most profound struggling,” notably concentrating on non-Arab communities.
The crimes, she mentioned, embody rape, arbitrary detention, executions and the creation of mass graves, usually filmed and celebrated by perpetrators.
Nazhat Shameem Khan (on display screen), Deputy Prosecutor of the Worldwide Legal Court docket (ICC), briefs the Security Council.
Fighters ‘celebrating executions’
Based mostly on video, audio and satellite tv for pc proof collected, the ICC Prosecutor has concluded that warfare crimes and crimes in opposition to humanity have been dedicated in El Fasher, notably in late October, following a protracted RSF siege of town.
Ms. Khan mentioned video footage confirmed patterns just like these documented in earlier atrocities in Darfur, together with the detention, mistreatment and killing of civilians from non-Arab tribes.
“Members of the RSF are seen celebrating direct executions and subsequently desecrating corpses,” she mentioned.
El Geneina investigations
The Workplace of the Prosecutor can be advancing investigations into crimes dedicated in El Geneina, the place witnesses have offered accounts of assaults on displacement camps, looting, gender-based violence and crimes in opposition to youngsters.
In 2023, El Geneina witnessed a few of the worst violence of the warfare as RSF fighters and allied militias carried out massacres in opposition to the Massalit neighborhood, forcing lots of of 1000’s to flee into neighbouring Chad.
UN officers and human rights investigators described the violence as ethnically motivated and warned of potential crimes in opposition to humanity.
Proof now signifies that the patterns of atrocities seen in El Geneina have since been replicated in El Fasher, Ms. Khan mentioned.
“This criminality is being repeated in town after town in Darfur,” she warned. “It should proceed till this battle, and the sense of impunity that fuels it, are stopped.”
A faculty in El Geneina in West Darfur State, which had been serving as a displaced individuals shelter, is burned to the bottom. (file)
Rape as a weapon of warfare
Sexual violence, together with rape, is getting used as a weapon of warfare, Ms. Khan mentioned, including that gender-based crimes stay a precedence for ICC investigations. She acknowledged cultural and safety limitations that stop survivors from reporting abuse, stressing the necessity for gender-sensitive and survivor-centred investigations.
Whereas a lot of the briefing centered on RSF abuses, the Deputy Prosecutor mentioned the ICC was additionally documenting allegations of crimes dedicated by the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), underscoring that every one events to the battle are certain by worldwide regulation to guard civilians.
Impunity overshadows progress
Ms. Khan cited the conviction final October of Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman, often called Ali Kushayb – a former Janjaweed militia chief – as a landmark step towards accountability, however cautioned that the dimensions of ongoing atrocities far outweighed any sense of progress.
She closed with a pointed name on Sudanese authorities to behave in opposition to senior suspects lengthy sought by the Court docket, together with former president Omar al-Bashir, former inside minister Ahmad Harun and former defence minister Abdel Raheem Muhammad Hussein.
“Motion should now be taken,” she mentioned, warning that justice for Darfur’s victims would stay hole with out arrests on the highest degree.
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