THE HAGUE: International Criminal Court prosecutors said on Monday they are collecting evidence of alleged mass killings and rapes after paramilitary Rapid Support Forces seized Al Fashir – the last stronghold of the military in Sudan’s Darfur region. The ICC has been investigating alleged genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Darfur since 2005 when the case was first referred by the UN Security Council, long before the current civil war erupted in 2023.
“Within the ongoing investigation, the office is taking immediate steps regarding the alleged crimes in Al Fashir to preserve and collect relevant evidence for its use in future prosecutions,” the ICC prosecutors said in a statement. More than 70,000 people have fled Al Fashir so far, and survivors have said about the separation and killing of men who left the Darfur city for safety. Experts have said the reported violence bears the hallmarks of previous episodes in Darfur that were widely labelled as genocide. The fate of almost 200,000 people thought to be trapped in the city remains unknown.
The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross said at that history was repeating itself in Darfur with the RSF’s capture of Al Fashir, giving it de facto control of more than a quarter of Sudan. Last month, the ICC, based in The Hague, convicted the first Janjaweed group leader to have been put on trial for atrocities committed in Darfur more than 20 years ago. The ICC can prosecute suspected perpetrators of war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide and in some cases the crime of aggression if committed on the territory of one of the court’s 125 member states, or by nationals of ICC members or when a case is referred by the UN Security Council.
Meanwhile, the head of the Red Cross says history is repeating itself in Sudan’s Darfur region after reports of mass killings during the fall of the city of Al Fashir to the Rapid Support Forces paramilitary last week. The RSF’s capture of Al Fashir – the Sudanese army’s last holdout in Darfur – marked a milestone in Sudan’s civil war, giving the paramilitary force de facto control of more than a quarter of the country’s territory. Hundreds of civilians and unarmed fighters may have been killed during the city’s fall, the UN human rights office said on Friday. Witnesses have described RSF fighters separating men from women and children, with gunshots ringing out afterwards. The RSF denies harming civilians.
The situation in Sudan is “horrific”, International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) President Mirjana Spoljaric said in a weekend interview during a visit to Riyadh. She said tens of thousands of people had fled Al Fashir after the RSF seized the city and it was likely that tens of thousands more were trapped there without access to food, water or medical assistance. “It’s history repeating, and it becomes worse every time a place is taken over by the other party,” she said.
Spoljaric also said the ICRC was “extremely concerned” about reports of a suspected massacre at the Saudi Hospital, the last-known functioning medical facility in Al Fashir, although it could not yet substantiate what happened there. ICRC staff in the nearby town of Tawila had heard reports that people fleeing were “sometimes collapsing and even dying out of exhaustion or because of their wounds,” Spoljaric said, calling the situation “absolutely beyond what we can consider acceptable.” The United States has said the RSF had committed genocide in the Darfur city of Geneina during an earlier stage of the two-and-a-half-year civil war, which the group denies. Rights groups and US officials have also accused the RSF and allied groups of ethnic cleansing in the region. — Reuters
