For years, Israel has used human rights terminology to whitewash killing civilians, now the RSF is doing the same.
On April 11, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) stormed the Zamzam displacement camp in Sudan’s North Darfur, burning huts and shops, executing medics, and firing at fleeing civilians.
According to monitors, at least 500 people – men, women, children and the elderly – were killed, and hundreds of thousands were forcibly displaced.
The attack provoked global outrage, prompting the RSF to double down on propaganda it had been spreading for months about Zamzam – that it was actually a military barracks.
“Zamzam was a military zone … so the RSF decided that we should evacuate civilians,” RSF adviser Ali Musabel told media, without providing evidence for his claim. “We didn’t want civilians to get caught in the crossfire.”
By labelling Zamzam a military zone, the RSF was trying to apply the same model Israel uses to justify bombing hospitals and schools in the Gaza Strip, said Rifaat Makawi, a Sudanese human rights lawyer.
“This is not a coincidence: it is a deliberate practice aimed at stripping civilians of their legal protection by labelling them as combatants or instruments of war,” he told media.
Throughout Sudan’s civil war, the RSF has used human rights jargon and terms from international humanitarian law (IHL) – the legal framework designed to protect civilians in times of war – to carry out atrocities.
It claims hospitals in Gaza are Hamas “control-and-command centres” – trying to justify attacking health facilities, which are protected under IHL. It also claims Hamas hides among civilians to use them as “human shields” to justify disproportionate and intentional attacks against those same civilians.
In addition, it has branded its mass expulsions of civilians as “humanitarian” evacuations, giving people hours to pack up their entire lives and get out of the way of Israeli bombs, if they can.
Israel stands accused of genocide by rights groups and United Nations experts for its war that has killed at least 52,567 Palestinians.
And the RSF is increasingly adopting Israel’s strategy, local monitors and legal experts say.
“The fact that the claims made by the RSF in Sudan resemble the claims Israel is making in Gaza … reveals the emergence of a template to commit mass extermination and even genocide,” said Luigi Daniele, a senior lecturer on IHL at Nottingham Law School.
A template for genocide
The UN accuses both sides in Sudan’s war of committing grave crimes, such as killing and torturing prisoners of war, since a power struggle between the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) erupted into an all-out civil war in April 2023.
Human rights groups accuse the RSF of perpetrating additional atrocities, including carrying out a possible genocide against the “non-Arab” communities in Darfur.
SAF and RSF were closely aligned until at least 2021, when they came together to overthrow the civilian administration with which they had been sharing power after a popular uprising toppled autocratic President Omar al-Bashir in 2019.
Shortly after the coup, the RSF signed a memorandum of understanding with the International Committee for the Red Cross (ICRC) to receive human rights training.
Now, the RSF and its political allies are using human rights terminology to try to whitewash their atrocities.
On March 8, an RSF-backed political alliance, Tasis (Foundation), tweeted: “We stand in solidarity with Sudanese women in their recent ordeal, where they have faced particularly tragic conditions and been subjected to horrific violations, as a result of the unjust war.”
Tasis made no mention of the reports published by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which accuse the RSF of widespread sexual violence and rape throughout the war.
During the raid on Zamzam, the RSF reportedly abducted 25 women and girls and raped others, according to the Strategic Initiative for Women in the Horn of Africa, a local monitor documenting sexual violence in the region.
“What I see today in Darfur, and specifically in Zamzam, is not merely a violation of the IHL, but evidence of its distortion and transformation into a cover under which the gravest crimes are committed,” human rights lawyer Makawi told media.
The Zamzam camp sprang up in 2003, 15km (9.3 miles) from North Darfur’s capital, el-Fasher, to shelter “non-Arab” Zaghawa and Fur communities, which fled Popular Defence Forces’ violence during the first Darfur war.
Both communities suffered genocidal levels of violence and were expelled from their lands by the state-backed Janjaweed. Zamzam soon became a symbol of the atrocities they endured.
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