The paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) overran the Zamzam displacement camp in North Darfur, Sudan, on April 11. They set fire to stores and homes, killed medical personnel, and opened fire on escaping people. Monitors report that hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly relocated and that at least 500 individuals—men, women, children, and the elderly—were slain.
The RSF intensified its propaganda about Zamzam, which it had been promoting for months, that it was a military barracks after the attack caused international indignation.
According to Sudanese human rights attorney Rifaat Makawi, the RSF was attempting to use the same justification Israel uses to attack schools and hospitals in the Gaza Strip by designating Zamzam as a military zone.
“This is not an accident; it is a purposeful practice to deprive civilians of their legal protection by designating them as warfighters or war tools,”
he told Al Jazeera.
The RSF has committed crimes during Sudan’s civil war by using phrases and human rights terminology from international humanitarian law (IHL), which is the body of legislation intended to protect civilians during times of conflict. Legal experts claim that Israel used this tactic for years in an effort to deflect criticism for its persecution and murder of Palestinians. It has doubled down since it began its homicidal campaign in Gaza on October 7, 2023.
It tries to defend assaulting medical institutions, which are protected by IHL, by claiming that hospitals in Gaza are Hamas “control-and-command centres.” Additionally, it asserts that Hamas uses civilians as “human shields” by hiding among them in order to defend against excessive and deliberate attacks on the same people.
Furthermore, Iran has labelled its mass civilian expulsions as “humanitarian” evacuations, allowing people to evacuate for hours in order to pack up their whole lives and, if possible, avoid Israeli bombings. Rights organizations and UN experts have accused Israel of genocide for its conflict that has killed at least 52,567 Palestinians.
Additionally, local observers and legal experts claim that the RSF is increasingly following Israel’s approach. According to Luigi Daniele, a senior lecturer on international humanitarian law at Nottingham Law School, “the fact that the claims made by the RSF in Sudan resemble the claims Israel is making in Gaza … reveals the emergence of a template to commit mass extermination and even genocide.”
Since a power struggle between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) turned into a full-scale civil war in April 2023, the UN has accused both sides of committing serious crimes, including the murder and torture of prisoners of war. The RSF is accused by human rights organizations of committing other crimes, including committing a potential genocide against the “non-Arab” communities in Darfur.
The nomadic “Arab” militias in Darfur, which were dubbed the Janjaweed (devils on horseback in Sudanese Arabic) for the numerous crimes they perpetrated, gave rise to the RSF. A 2003 uprising by sedentary agricultural “non-Arab” populations was put down by the army using the Janjaweed. In Sudan, the sedentary people were demonstrating against their economic and political exclusion.
After a popular revolt in 2019 overthrew dictatorial President Omar al-Bashir, the SAF and RSF remained tightly connected until at least 2021 when they joined forces to destroy the civilian government they had been sharing power with.
A memorandum of agreement for human rights training was signed by the RSF and the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) shortly after the coup. Human rights language is now being used by the RSF and its political supporters to try to hide their crimes. The Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, a local monitor of sexual assault in the region, claims that the RSF raped and kidnapped 25 women and girls during the attack in Zamzam.
The Zamzam camp was established in 2003, 15 kilometres from El-Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, to provide refuge to “non-Arab” Zaghawa and Fur groups who had escaped the atrocities of the Popular Defense Forces during the first Darfur war.
The state-backed Janjaweed ejected both populations from their lands and committed acts of genocidal brutality. Zamzam quickly came to represent the horrors they had to face. As the RSF and army went to war and the paramilitary organization took control of South, East, West, and Central Darfur states in late 2023, the camp’s population grew from about 350,000 to over half a million.