And a warning that this podcast references war crimes such as sexual violence and genocide.
TRANSCRIPT
Hafiz Tokka has spent 21 years - almost half his life - putting the traumas of his past behind him.
As a genocide survivor from Sudan, a country that sits just south of Egypt in north-east Africa, he still remembers the time at 26-year-old when he had to run for his life as his home village of Touri was burned to ash.
“They come early in the morning around five o'clock in the morning. So when the people are sleeping and they started burning the houses because the houses is made of the grasses and bush wood. Once the people, they come out shouting and screaming and they don't know who is targeting them, they start shooting the people. If you are safe from that you can flee by yourself and go for assistance to any relative that you know. Otherwise you'll be targeted again and they can kidnap you and take you to their camps.”
He is a member of the Fur tribe, one of the African ethnic groups from the Darfur region of Sudan who were targeted in mass killings and acts of sexual violence in the early to mid 2000s.
Government-sponsored Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, killed more than 200,000 people, systematically raped non-Arab women and girls, and displaced over two million people from their homes.
And now, many believe those familiar horrors of genocide have returned to Darfur, this time at the hands of the successor to those same militias, a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces or RSF.
“What happened in Sudan back then was indeed a case of genocide according to many experts, and I share that view. The people that are part of the R-S-F and the leader were back then called Janjaweed, and they perpetrated mass violence against civilian population of these African Sudanese tribes. And today, decades later, we see something similar. The RSF has perpetrated mass violence against the same communities, the same African tribes, including many civilians.”
That's Dr Eyal Mayroz, a Senior Lecturer on human rights and international peace and security at the University of Sydney.
In a rare declaration earlier this month, the United States government accused the RSF of perpetrating genocidal acts amid the devastating civil war that has engulfed Sudan since April 2023.
In a statement to SBS, the US State Department says their declaration is based upon...
“...corroborated reports of brutal efforts by the Rapid Support Forces and allied militias to systematically target and destroy vulnerable ethnic communities. RSF fighters have deliberately murdered men and boys on an ethnic basis, raped women in an effort to alter the population, and targeted fleeing civilians to prevent them from surviving elsewhere or returning to their homes.”
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken also announced sanctions on the leader of the militants, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo - known as Hemedti.
Hemedti is currently locked in a power struggle with rival general of the Sudanese Armed Forces, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, with the two battling for control of Sudan.
Sudan researcher and Fellow at the Rift Valley Institute, Eric Reeves, says the evidence of the RSF's genocide speaks for itself.
“We've known for well over a year that the assault on El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, was genocide, by all the standards that have been established by international criminal law. There's just no doubt about it and there hasn't been.”
In 2023, soon after the civil war broke out, the RSF killed between 10,000 and 15,000 people in the city of El Geneina in Sudan's West Darfur region according to UN estimates.
Survivors of the massacres say dark-skinned Sudanese people and those from the Masalit tribe were deliberately targeted and killed, as opposed to the Arab population.
Jamal Abdullah Khamis, a 29-year-old human rights lawyer from El Geneina and a Masalit man, told Human Rights Watch of the horrors he witnessed first-hand while his people attempted to flee the city.
“They were arguing with people. They stopped the cars. They opened fire on us. They shot at the chests of children, women, old and young men. It was a harrowing scene. We were running through the streets and saw bodies everywhere of women and children. They were the bodies of people we knew personally. But you can't stop and help someone who is dead in the street. We kept running because we were being chased.”
Stories like these are all too familiar to Hafiz Tokka who say the methods of the RSF have not changed from the Janjaweed militias who destroyed his village in 2003.
“The weapons they use is killing, raping, torturing. If you are the family man, those group of the militias, they come to your house, first of all what they do, they just separate the men and separate the woman. They are taking the woman and raped them in front of you as the father of this family. And then if you try to defend the family, they will kill you and shoot you in front of your family.”
Two of his uncles were killed by militants on their farms.
Hafiz was able to escape to Egypt and, ultimately, to Australia where he's lived in Sydney for the past 18 years.
The initial genocide of the Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa tribes was perpetrated by the Janjaweed militias under the command of Sudan's former dictator Omar al-Bashir who would also use his military to drop bombs on regions he claimed were sheltering rebel groups.
One of these communities was the village of Karo Karo, the home of Dr Alpha Furbell Lisimba, another genocide survivor from the Fur tribe who now lives in Melbourne.
His home town was destroyed by militias and the government in 2001 when he was just 16-years-old.
“The Janjaweed militias will come on the horseback. They'll come and attack people while they're doing the farming, and then the government will come and drop the bombs. And then we would just run and run away. So if you're able to escape, you run away. If you're not able to escape, you could either be shot down or you could be killed. Pregnant women were being killed and the village was actually burned down to the ashes. Nothing is left.”
He was able to escape, walking for two weeks until he reached the Central African Republic, only to be reunited with his mother seven months later.
His father Hassan wasn't so lucky and was killed amid the destruction.
“I cried, I cried, I cried. But nothing much you can do because it's not only me. Someone else would also say my dad or my mum or my brother's been killed.”
And now, over the past two years, the Sudanese Civil War war has killed tens of thousands, internally displaced more than 11 and a half million people and allegedly allowed for the RSF to continue their attacks on minority ethnic groups.
In response to the US accusation of genocide, the Rapid Support Forces have denied the claims, saying:
“These decisions are clearly politically motivated and were made without an independent and thorough investigation...The State Department’s claim that the RSF committed genocide in Sudan is inaccurate.”
Sudan researcher Eric Reeves says he doesn't believe the U-S's declaration will have a significant impact on the paramilitary group's actions.
“I don't. The Rapid Support Forces are mercenaries. They're not soldiers fighting for a cause. They have no ideology, they have no political vision. Many of them don't even speak Arabic in a way that other Sudanese can understand. They're from Niger, from Chad, from Mali, from a host of country, and they have no interest in Sudan other than as a place to plunder.”
The US has also announced sanctions on a number of RSF-linked companies in the United Arab Emirates, a country who have long been accused of supporting the paramilitary group.
Mr Reeves says it's about time the UAE was targeted for their alleged role in inflaming the war, but he says there must be more accountability.
“The United Arab Emirates is an ally of the US, there's a naval base there, and there's been a reluctance to speak the truth. This war would stop if the Emirates did not supply the Rapid Support Forces as they have from the beginning. Until we started speaking the truth about the role of the Emirates. We're not going to see an enter the violence, to the genocide.”
The UAE remains Australia's closest trade ally in the Middle East, with annual trade worth about $10 billion, and the two governments have signed a new Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement in November that will bring the countries even closer together.
Dr Mayroz from the University of Sydney says it's Australia's responsibility, as party to the UN Genocide Convention, to take a stronger position on these alleged crimes in Sudan, especially if a close partner nation were to be directly complicit.
“Even if Australia has not the same power that the Americans have, certainly there is room for more middle power countries together to exact influence on international politics. I think it has a moral duty and moral responsibility to do more than it has been both in relation to Gaza and now in relation to Sudan.”
In a statement to SBS, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade says the Australian government is "extremely concerned by the conflict" and have announced $50 million to address famine and widespread humanitarian need.
They failed to address a question on the alleged role of the UAE in the atrocities.
Genocide survivor, Dr Alpha Lisimba, is not expecting the international community to intervene and stop the killing of his people.
He says he feels hopeless with his family in Darfur once again at risk of being attacked by remnants of the same militias that murdered his father and never faced justice.
“I kind of lost hope. I lost hope and I feel very frustrated, both for my people in Sudan and also for the international community that is not really doing anything. Everyone is just watching and ignoring what's happening. We went to Canberra and spoke to Australian government. The people on the table, they speak very good and we'll do our best. But then tomorrow the killing is still going on.”
