In this new Sudan, will the elite protesters stand up for suffering Darfur?

The capital’s protest leaders made a deal with the military. Non-Arabs in Sudan’s periphery fear that their freedom...

Since 2003, the self-identifying ethnic Arab militia known as the Janjaweed, now rebranded as the RSF, has attacked non-Arab villages across the remote Darfur region. The UN estimated Darfuri casualties at 300,000 in 2008. Half the population of six million people fled either across the border into Chad, where more than 300,000 remain sixteen years later, or to internally displaced people’s camps, where 1.5 million continue to live in dismal circumstances.

Human Rights Watch and other impartial monitors have catalogued the systematic rape of girls and women by the RSF, the murder of boys and men, the looting of livestock and the destruction of non-Arab communities. Although the mainstream media has moved on from Darfur, non-Arab citizens there continue to be terrorised by the RSF and its proxies. In July this year, the UN assistant secretary-general, Andrew Gilmour, confirmed the persecution of civilians had again reached worrying levels. “We believe that many cases in Darfur remain invisible and under-reported due to lack of access to some parts of the region,” he said.

Gilmour was referring to the absence of passable roads in an area the size of France or Texas. He was also implicitly acknowledging the weakness of the UN-African Union peacekeeping mission, UNAMID.

Meanwhile, in the south of Sudan, the non-Arab people of Blue Nile and South Kordofan states have been sealed off, bombed and starved since 2011. The same Sudanese armed forces now represented on the Transitional Military Council worked with the ousted president, Omar Bashir, to ethnically cleanse the area of what Khartoum saw as unreliable citizens. A few months ago, when the human rights NGO Waging Peace (which I founded) interviewed refugees who fled to South Sudan to escape the Sudanese militia, they found no enthusiasm to return.

A report by the Sudan Consortium – a group of human rights organisations – records an increase in the numbers injured and killed by Sudanese armed forces this year. It states: “Civilians in the two areas [Blue Nile and South Kordofan] have not noticed any meaningful change following the toppling of Bashir and the struggle for power between the Transitional Military Council and the civilian opposition forces.”

The children’s drawings accompanying this article illustrate the terror of daily life in the long-marginalised regions. They were collected by Waging Peace in a refugee camp on the South Sudan border last December.

Since 2003, the self-identifying ethnic Arab militia known as the Janjaweed, now rebranded as the RSF, has attacked non-Arab villages across the remote Darfur region. The UN estimated Darfuri casualties at 300,000 in 2008. Half the population of six million people fled either across the border into Chad, where more than 300,000 remain sixteen years later, or to internally displaced people’s camps, where 1.5 million continue to live in dismal circumstances.

Human Rights Watch and other impartial monitors have catalogued the systematic rape of girls and women by the RSF, the murder of boys and men, the looting of livestock and the destruction of non-Arab communities. Although the mainstream media has moved on from Darfur, non-Arab citizens there continue to be terrorised by the RSF and its proxies. In July this year, the UN assistant secretary-general, Andrew Gilmour, confirmed the persecution of civilians had again reached worrying levels. “We believe that many cases in Darfur remain invisible and under-reported due to lack of access to some parts of the region,” he said.

Gilmour was referring to the absence of passable roads in an area the size of France or Texas. He was also implicitly acknowledging the weakness of the UN-African Union peacekeeping mission, UNAMID.

Meanwhile, in the south of Sudan, the non-Arab people of Blue Nile and South Kordofan states have been sealed off, bombed and starved since 2011. The same Sudanese armed forces now represented on the Transitional Military Council worked with the ousted president, Omar Bashir, to ethnically cleanse the area of what Khartoum saw as unreliable citizens. A few months ago, when the human rights NGO Waging Peace (which I founded) interviewed refugees who fled to South Sudan to escape the Sudanese militia, they found no enthusiasm to return.

A report by the Sudan Consortium – a group of human rights organisations – records an increase in the numbers injured and killed by Sudanese armed forces this year. It states: “Civilians in the two areas [Blue Nile and South Kordofan] have not noticed any meaningful change following the toppling of Bashir and the struggle for power between the Transitional Military Council and the civilian opposition forces.”

The children’s drawings accompanying this article illustrate the terror of daily life in the long-marginalised regions. They were collected by Waging Peace in a refugee camp on the South Sudan border last December.