A Massacre Threatens Darfur -- Again

[Celerity]

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/06/19/world/africa/sudan-darfur-siege.html

https://archive.ph/Mxw2g



A civil war is ripping apart Sudan, one of Africa’s largest countries. Tens of thousands have been killed, millions scattered and an enormous famine looms, setting off one of the world’s biggest humanitarian crises. The city of El Fasher, home to 1.8 million people, is now at the center of global alarm. If it falls, officials warn, there may be little to stop a massacre. Fighters battling Sudan’s military for control of the country have encircled the city. Gunfights rage. Hospitals have closed. Residents are running out of food. The advancing fighters are known as the Rapid Support Forces — the successors to the notorious Janjaweed militias that slaughtered ethnic African tribes in Darfur in the 2000s. Last week, the U.N. Security Council demanded that they “halt the siege” of the city. Yet a New York Times examination of satellite imagery and video from El Fasher makes one thing clear: The assault is intensifying.



The Times analyzed videos and satellite images of El Fasher, along with imagery analysis from the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab and the Sudan Witness Project at the Centre for Information Resilience, a nonprofit organization that documents potential war crimes. The evidence shows that thousands of homes have been systematically razed and that tens of thousands of people have been forced to flee. Videos show the demeaning treatment of captives and the presence of a senior Rapid Support Forces commander recently singled out by U.S. sanctions for his role in atrocities against civilians. The Sudanese military, too, has faced accusations of war crimes, mostly for the indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas with artillery and airstrikes. On May 11, Doctors Without Borders said, the military bombed an area next to a children’s hospital.



‘Precipice’ of a massacre

The siege of El Fasher has disturbing echoes of Rapid Support Forces tactics elsewhere in Darfur, where assaults were accompanied by ethnic slaughter, experts say. Last fall, when the fighters captured El Geneina, near Sudan’s border with Chad, as many as 15,000 people were killed in a matter of days, U.N. investigators found. Longstanding ethnic tensions have underpinned the violence in Darfur for decades. Just as the Arab-dominated Janjaweed carried out a genocidal campaign against ethnic Africans in the 2000s, the Rapid Support Forces are targeting them now, with international warnings that a genocide could happen again. In April, Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the American ambassador to the U.N., warned that El Fasher was “on the precipice of a large-scale massacre.”



Aid supplies choked

El Fasher is not just a city under siege. It is also a hub for relief aid in a region hurtling toward famine.
Already 1.7 million people are starving in Darfur, the U.N. says. Now, the consequences of the war are rippling across the region, which is the size of Spain. Food and medicine are running short in East Darfur, where tens of thousands fled the fighting, because the supply route through El Fasher has been cut off, aid workers say. And in Central Darfur, some food prices doubled after commercial traders could no longer operate, according to Islamic Relief, an aid group working there. The crisis is compounded by a severe lack of funds. The United Nations issued an emergency appeal for $2.7 billion. It has received less than a fifth of that. American officials accuse both sides in the civil war of using hunger as a weapon.

Commanders Accused of Crimes...............

snip

a large amount of visuals (and further, specific information) are at the top link

[sarisataka]

1. Unfortunately not interesting enough

To generate protests or get much more than a footnote's notice at the UN.

$2.7 billion and they can't get that covered? A billion each from the US, EU and China would more than cover it. And it would be pocket lint to each of them.

[Celerity]

2. adjusted for comparison with the US population, Sweden has given closing in on 870 million USD equivalent

The US population is 32 times larger than Sweden's.

https://fts.unocha.org/plans/1188/summary