Janjaweed

I mean, your listeners may recall that two decades ago, there was a very similar conflict.

At that stage, there was a group known as the Janjaweed that was essentially an Arab militia, quite primitive.

You know, people... literally running around on camels with AK-47s that committed genocide at that stage.

And the International Criminal Court has filed charges.

It was broadly condemned.

The Janjaweed has morphed today, two decades later, into the Rapid Support Forces.

But today, the RSF is not a bunch of people running around on camels.

They have been very professionally armed by the United Arab Emirates.

Meanwhile, land conflicts between Arab and non-Arab groups intensified, escalating from sporadic violence to organized warfare.

Seeking security, Hameti joined his fighters with the Janjaweed, a coalition of Arab tribal militias from Darfur and Eastern Chad.

Known as Devils on Horseback, this group was notorious for brutality.

Bashir ultimately enlisted the Janjaweed to suppress Darfurian non-Arab rebel groups.

During these conflicts, Muhammad earned the nickname Hameti, meaning Little Muhammad in Sudanese Arabic.

Despite his youth, he showed notable bravery and a strong propensity for violence, impressing older fighters and surprising his peers.

Hameti's reputation for brutality led to his promotion as leader of a brigade in southern Darfur.

Despite lacking formal military training, his aggressive and effective counterinsurgency strategies proved successful, increasing his notoriety and influence.

The Arabs in the north were in control, and the Africans in the south were actually victims of a genocide, particularly the Darfur genocide in 2003 to 2008, when over 300,000 were killed, 2.7 million forced into displacement camps.

Responsible for this massacre were the Janjaweed militia who were instructed, restructured into the rapid support forces who are part of the mission responsible for the current trouble now.

Okay, not much protest from the world because it was Muslims killing Christians and that's okay.

Get to 2021, the Pro-Democracy Alliance set up a government which signed up a constitutional declaration charter which abolished repressive measures of dictatorship, including Islamic elements, such as female genital manipulation and the apostasy death penalty.

Do not empower security actors that are responsible for patrolling borders, specifically the RSF in the country, because this will have really dire consequences.

They are a group that grew out of the Janjaweed militias that also committed atrocities in the early 2000s.

And, you know, domestic actors were well aware of the possible consequences.

And even EU documents that Nick and I examine in the book acknowledge that there were extreme risks to providing this type of funding.

In February this year, Musa Hilal, the leader of the Mahamid, a subgroup of the Rizagat, fled Darfur to the safety of an SAF-controlled area after the RSF attacked his base.

And this was a big deal, as Hilal had previously served as the leader of the Janjaweed, the militia group that the RSF is descended from, and many of the RSF's commanders had served under him.

The attack on Hilal triggered a wave of defections from the RSF, with many Mahmoud commanders leaving the group.

Dalloub is also believed to be a part of the Mahmoud, according to local outlet IIM Network.

the RSA, rapid security forces, or RSF, rapid response forces, rapid security force.

They were part of the United Arab Emirates, split away and became supporters of the terrorist insurgency, the Janjaweed.

And these two armies, regular Sudanese army, Emirati-backed army, are fighting each other in Western and Southern Sudan for control of minerals.

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But this scenario is what's currently happening, is a direct parallel of what's currently happening in Sudan.

The RSF militia is a private militia group formed in 2013 that was deployed, that was formed out of a previous militia alliance called the Janjaweed that the Sudanese government utilized as a militia, various militia groups used to do its dirty work.

This is something that every country utilizes, every government utilizes militias to do work that the government itself wants to wipe its hands clean of.

And there's a larger issue of private militia groups being utilized for human rights violations.

Well, it's a little hard to be a stable country when you have the United Arab Emirates backing half of the armed forces to fight the other half of the armed forces to gain all of the gold and rare minerals in southwest Sudan, which, by the way, is a traditionally black is the ace of states Sudanese part of Sudan, not the Arab part of Sudan in the north.

That's South Sudan's Kordofan, who were Christians, and they created the Janjaweed militias, and now the Rapid Security Force that used to be part of the Sudanese government to fight the Sudanese regular government.

So I have just, you know, I know that I was with, you know, working with the UAE in 2011 when they went into Libya.

But they've become an expeditionary country now.

So Europe chose to fund border control and capacitate border control in Sudan prior to the outbreak of the current civil war when the rapid support forces had been chosen as the primary border entity patrolling Sudan's northern border with Egypt and Libya.

As a result, you know, not entirely because of that, but it did factor into seeing this entity that grew out of the Janjaweed militias of the early 2000s as a legitimate state actor.

And that helped to provide them with legitimacy and helped give them power within the state.

And now they are one of the two main entities engaged in this more than three-year civil war in the country.