UN Special Adviser warns of looming genocide in Sudan

NAIROBI, Kenya

The United Nations Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide has sounded an alarm on an impending genocide in Sudan, especially in the volatile Darfur Region.

While briefing members of the UN Security Council on Tuesday, Alice Wairimu Nderitu succinctly said she had unequivocally raised an alarm about the ongoing situation in Sudan. She said genocide is preceded by risk factors and indicators.

“This situation today bears all the marks of risk of genocide, with strong allegations that this crime has already been committed. Civilians are far from protected. Civilian populations are targeted on the basis of identity,” she reported. “In Darfur and El Fasher, civilians are being attacked and killed because of the color of their skin, because of their ethnicity, because of who they are. They are also targeted with hate speech and with direct incitement to violence.”

Wairimu said she has publicly and severally raised concerns about the situation from the perspective of her mandate in the last twenty months.

Alice Wairimu Nderitu

“Ever since the conflict erupted in April 2023, alarms have been relentlessly raised of systematic and indiscriminate attacks against innocent civilians in Khartoum, Darfur, Kordofan, Blue Nile, and Gezira, among others,” she conveyed. “In October last year, I undertook a visit to Chad, including the eastern border with Sudan, aimed at collecting first-hand information from refugees from the West Darfur region.”

Wairimu added: “What I heard was horrifying. Refugees based in Farchana and Adre, many of them from the Masalit ethnic community, described the vicious violence they were subjected to and outspokenly alluded to elements which could indicate explicit intent to destroy their particular ethnic group.”

She said that intent to destroy is one of the key elements of the crime of genocide. Article II of the Genocide Convention defines the crime as any of a series of acts – Wairimu quoted- ‘committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.’

“Violence that has allegedly been inflicted upon them include, among others, persistent use of rape as a weapon of war and other forms of sexual and gender-based violence; burning of entire villages; forced displacement; deprivation of conditions of life, including bombing of medical facilities and transportation, and deliberately limiting access to water and electricity,” she said. “This is accompanied by the use of derogatory language as blacks and as (‘slaves’) as an element of incitement to violence. Sexual and gender-based violence provides a clear gender dimension of this vicious violence, together with the targeting of young men and boys.”