Comment by Arezki Daoud | 6 June 2019: Taking place simultaneously with the Algerian protests, Sudan has gone from a country of hope to a complete disaster. Militants in both countries keep an eye on each others and see if they can borrow tactics that work.
These two kinds of Arab revolutions are going through their own setbacks. In Algeria, although there has been no violence in the ongoing protest movement, with only one recorded death, the military has been playing the role of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, with army chief, General Gaid Salah one day sounding nice and ready to forge ahead with new ideas, the next day threatening and menacing. Today’s speech by the Interim President Bensalah hints that the regime is not ready for real progress.
In Sudan, the situation has gotten worse. After visiting his sponsors in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, General Fattah al-Burhan went back to Khartoum pumped up and ready to hit. On 3 June, soldiers and paramilitary thugs disperse the protest camp outside the army HQ with force, leaving more than 100 dead.
As one political commentator said…
“even the devil would have waited the end of the Eid al-Fitr holiday to go violent.”
The Sudanese regime did better than that and unleashed mayhem during the last day of Ramadan. To understand how ruthless Sudan’s rulers are, just have a look at the profile of the man they hired to discipline the good people of Sudan. See below.
Sudan’s Dagalo, feared Darfur militia chief at heart of crackdown
Cairo, June 6, 2019 (AFP) – Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo has gone from a militia chief in Sudan’s war-torn Darfur to the country’s second-in-command, in charge of a paramilitary force accused of gunning down protesters in Khartoum. When security personnel attacked demonstrators camped out in the heart of the capital on Monday it was his powerful Rapid Support Forces (RSF) that witnesses said were at the forefront of the bloodshed.
A doctors committee backing the protests has put the death toll from the ferocious crackdown at 108, while the government has said 61 people died across the country. Dressed in desert fatigues, the tall and slightly stooped Dagalo — widely known by his nickname Himeidti — has become a regular fixture on television since Sudan’s military ousted veteran leader Omar al-Bashir on April 11. Sworn in as the deputy head of the military council that took power, he at first positioned himself on the side of the demonstrators who helped end Bashir’s 30-year rule.
But as his heavily-armed men have fanned out across Khartoum, Dagalo has struck a more hardline tone and on Wednesday he insisted “will not allow chaos”. “Although he’s not educated, in his interactions he comes across as extremely street-smart and somebody who’s in charge of the situation,” said a European diplomat who met him shortly after Bashir was toppled.
– Janjaweed commander –
Dagalo’s power and the force he commands have their roots in the infamous Janjaweed militias accused of horrific abuses in Darfur. A camel and sheep trader with little formal education, his rise began when the authorities started training and arming nomadic Arab raiders to counter an ethnic minority rebellion that broke out in 2003. The groups — known as Janjaweed — were sent to attack villages on camel and horseback as part of a campaign of terror that saw Bashir indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by the International Criminal Court.
Dagalo was in charge of one of the militias that operated in the chaos of the Darfur conflict — even announcing in 2008 that he was starting his own rebellion against Khartoum. Filmed deep in the bush in Darfur, with his face partially concealed, Dagalo denied his troops had been involved in abuses and claimed his Darfur Arab peoples were the victims of marginalisation. But he soon reconciled with Khartoum and by 2013 he was appointed commander of a new force made up of former, mostly Arab, militiamen as Khartoum once again sought to crush the insurgency — the RSF.
– ‘Politically ambitious’ –
“It seems Bashir increasingly distrusted the regular army and the intelligence service… and thus empowered the RSF as a praetorian guard and third pole of power,” said Sudan expert Jerome Tubiana. The RSF won a number of victories against rebels in 2014 and 2015, but were accused by Amnesty International of extrajudicial killings and rapes. Dagalo denied the charges, and invited journalists to see his troops display dozens of vehicles and weapons captured from the Rebel Justice and Equality Movement in a major 2015 victory. His forces were also deployed to fight other insurgencies in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states. When Sudan joined the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen in 2015, the RSF were deployed there, a major boon for Dagalo and now-head of the military council Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. “It allowed him, alongside al-Burhan, to meet United Arab Emirates officials and Saudi officials and present themselves as possible successors of Bashir,” Tubiana said.
When the military ousted Bashir, Dagalo became the second most powerful man in the country. But that may not be the extent of his aims. Sources say he has set his eyes high and is looking ahead to what will come after the country’s political transition. “He is highly politically ambitious. One has to watch and wait how his ambitions unfold,” a western diplomat said.
Sudan’s RSF, ‘new version’ of Darfur’s Arab militias
Cairo, June 6, 2019 (AFP) – Heavily armed and dressed in desert fatigues, Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have made their presence felt in Khartoum since military generals cracked down on a long-running sit-in. Piled onto pickup trucks mounted with machine guns or patrolling the streets on foot, they are seen by some protesters as a new version of the infamous Janjaweed militias accused of horrific abuses in Darfur. The RSF is a paramilitary force led by the deputy head of the ruling Transitional Military Council, Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, nicknamed Himeidti.
Dagalo was a former leader of one of the Arab Janjaweed militias at the height of the conflict in Darfur that started in 2003. The Janjaweed militias were recruited when Khartoum trained and equipped Arab raiders to crush an ethnic minority rebellion in the area. The groups were sent to attack villages on camel and horseback as part of a campaign of terror that saw now ousted president Omar al-Bashir indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by the International Criminal Court (ICC).
In 2013, during clashes between the Arab militias and the security forces in Darfur, “Dagalo was one of the few commanders to stay loyal to the regime, which got him chosen for the RSF — the new paramilitary force aiming to control and strengthen the Janjaweed,” said Jerome Tubiana, a researcher specialised in Sudan. Under the control of Sudan’s powerful National Intelligence and Security Services (NISS) and then the presidency, the RSF was sent to fight insurgents in Darfur, and in South Kordofan and Blue Nile states. But the force was accused by rights groups of abuses against civilians in Darfur, such as rape, extrajudicial killings, looting, torture and burning villages.
In 2014, the ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda called them the “new version of the Janjaweed”. That same year, Abbas Abdelaziz, the NISS officer jointly in charge of the force with Dagalo, said calling the RSF “Janjaweed” was an insult, insisting the men had combat experience and had “become professionals”. According to him, the force was then made up of 6,000 members, 1,500 of whom were from the Sudanese armed forces. Between 2017 and 2018, “several thousand of the RSF were heavily rearmed (and given training by Russians) in a bid to protect Bashir”, Tubiana said. But all that changed in April when demonstrators launched the sit-in outside army headquarters in Khartoum to demand the departure of Bashir. Himeidti refused to break up the sit-in, Tubiana said. The protest allowed the army to topple Bashir, after three decades of authoritarian rule.
On Monday security personnel attacked demonstrators at the sit-in site outside army headquarters in Khartoum. Witnesses said RSF were at the forefront of a “massacre” that had left dozens dead and hundreds wounded, and referred to the attackers as “Janjaweed”. In Yemen, the RSF have fought alongside the regular Sudanese army in the Arab coalition led by Saudi Arabia against Iran-backed Houthi rebels since 2015.
