An internally displaced woman carries aids in sacks after collecting from a group at a camp in Gadaref on May 12.-/Getty Images
Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court say they are urgently accelerating their probe of atrocities in Darfur, seeking to prevent a second genocide in the region, where the perpetrators of earlier massacres have largely escaped justice.
For more than a decade, the ICC has struggled to arrest those accused of orchestrating genocide in Darfur in the early 2000s, including former Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, who has evaded the court in The Hague for 15 years. Only one suspect has ever faced trial.
Now the court is trying again to provide justice for new atrocities in the same region, located in western Sudan. Its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, launched a campaign on Tuesday to gather evidence of crimes against humanity in Darfur, at a time when violent attacks on civilians and hospitals are worsening.
“It is an outrage that we are allowing history to repeat itself once again in Darfur,” Mr. Khan said in a video statement on social media.
“We cannot and must not allow Darfur to become the world’s forgotten atrocity once again. We must show whether there is value in our statements, in our promise, that all international crimes are deserving of accountability, that all people are equal, that all communities deserve the protection of the law.”
He noted that the United Nations Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, had recently issued a chilling warning that the risk of genocide in Darfur is expanding. Civilians in Darfur are being targeted for attack based on their ethnicity and the colour of their skin, he said.
Evidence gathered by the court’s prosecutors – who are on the ground in Sudan and neighbouring Chad – has already documented a surge of attacks on hospitals and camps for displaced people in Darfur, along with widespread sexual violence and the shelling and looting of civilian areas, Mr. Khan said.
“The suffering that’s being endured is widening. And we cannot say that there has been no warning.”
He said the court’s investigators have collected evidence of massacres in cities such as El Geneina, in West Darfur, where an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 civilians from African minority groups were killed by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, and its allied Arab militias last year.
Now they have broadened their probe to include North Darfur’s capital, El Fasher, the last major city in Darfur that the RSF has not yet captured. In recent weeks, the RSF has tightened its siege of the city and pushed closer to the city centre, attacking camps for displaced people and firing barrages of shells that have killed civilians.
Last Saturday, RSF soldiers stormed into South Hospital, one of the last functioning hospitals in El Fasher, where they opened fire on patients and staff and looted the facility, stealing medicine, cellphones and an ambulance. The hospital had survived two earlier mortar bomb explosions as the fighting intensified around it.
Humanitarian agency Médecins sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders), which had medical staff working at the hospital, said the chaos after the latest attack made it impossible to know if anyone was killed or wounded.
“This is not an isolated incident, as staff and patients have endured attacks on the facility for weeks from all sides, but opening fire inside a hospital crosses a line,” said Michel Lacharité, MSF head of emergency operations.
The hospital, the only one in El Fasher equipped for mass casualties, was forced to close its doors after the latest attack. It had treated more than 1,300 injured patients over the past month.
The World Health Organization said it was appalled by the attack. The hospital’s closing has left the city’s remaining two hospitals stretched beyond their capacity, further limiting access to life-saving services, the organization said in a statement.
The UN children’s agency, Unicef, estimated that the lives of 750,000 children are at risk in El Fasher.
“Thousands of children, including those living in large displacement camps, are trapped in the middle of the increased fighting and are not able to reach safety,” said Adele Khodr, Unicef director for the Middle East and North Africa.
Another relief agency, CARE, reported that 800,000 people have escaped the fighting in El Fasher by fleeing into neighbouring East Darfur, triggering a humanitarian catastrophe there.
Many have been displaced multiple times and have arrived in poor shape – often exhausted, malnourished and suffering severe health problems – and the health system is too overburdened to cope with all of them, CARE said in a statement on Tuesday.
“Most escaped at a moment’s notice due to the fighting with only the clothes on their backs, without any food or clean drinking water,” the agency said.
Their 300-kilometre journey from El Fasher was long and harrowing because of multiple checkpoints, the threat of extortion and scorching temperatures of more than 50 degrees, it said.