Darfur: Blueprint for Genocide - Archipielago Libertad

tension between the tw o communities. Western Darfur
was put under military rule. Many educated Massaleit and
Massaleit members of the state council were arrested.
Against this background of state repression, Arab militias
began attacking and burning Massaleit villages with
killings of up to 75 people at a time. Attacks were timed to
coincide with the harvest. The Government claimed that
this was a tribal conflict although there were reports of the
inv olvement of uniformed men. 29 Identity badges found on
a number of dead militia showed one to be a colonel in the
Sudanese army and indicated that some members came
from Chad, Liby a and Sy ria. 30
Betw een 15 July 2000 and 28 April 2002 therewere 156
attacks recorded by Fur members of Parliament (National
Assembly). They handed the list that
they compiled to Sudanese President,
Al Bashir. See Appendix F for list
referring to dates and locations of
attacks, numbers of people killed and
injured in each attack and number of
properties lost.
Further evidence of organised v iolence
against African villages pre-dating the
rebel attacks in February 2003 can be
found in a document written by the son
of the last Fur Sultan. Before he died in 2003, he
documented all the African villages that had been
destroyed from 2000. The list exceeds 200 villages. A
translatedversion can be found in Appendix E.
3.2 Genocidal acts in the current
crisis
3.2.1 Killing: targeting civilians
In Nov ember 2004 the number of deaths commonly
quoted in Darfur is 70,000. However, this figure only
represents deaths in IDP camps in Darfur betw een March
and the beginning of October 2004. 31 To date the accurate
figure for deaths in the genocide is unknown, but Eric
Reeves has used a variety of sources and statistical
methods to estimate mortality numbers approaching
29 Johnson, D. (2003). The Root Causes of Sudan’s Civil Wars,
International African Institute, London, p. 141.
30 Sudan Human Rights Organization (2000). “ Ethnic Cleansing of
the Darfur Muslims: The Massaleit”, http://www.shrocairo.org/reports/masaleit.htm,
[Accessed 7 October 2004].
31 WHO, (2004). “ Mortality Projections for Darfur” , 15 October 2004,
http://www.who.int/disasters/repo/14985.pdf [Accessed 13
November 2004].
‘Organised
violence against
African villages
pre-dated rebel
attacks in
February 2003.’
Section 3: Systematic Actions Amounting to Genocide
300,000. 32 Save the Children now agrees that 200,000 to
300,000 have died since the start of the Darfur conflict. 33
Some of these deaths are a direct result of v iolence,
others due to the livingconditions of the displaced.
The Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) station at the Chad-
Darfur border town of Adré was expecting many wounded
refugees inChad. But they did not arrive. Many remained
IDPs in Darfur. The 200,000 that went to Chad by July
2004 seeped over the long border and gradually
congregated in camps. As the refugee camps began to
swell in Chad in the spring and summer of 2004,
journalists and NGO workers remarked that the refugees
arriv ed without sign of injury. The absence of obvious
wounds, blood and corpses suggested that these were
civilians fleeing a civilwar.
It took closer scrutiny to understand
what was happening. In July 2004 one
of the authors, James Smith, a
physician, found that many refugees in
the Chad camps had evidence of
wounds betw een 3-6 months old,
consistent w ith gunshot injuries. This
included many children. Most refugees
had taken many months to arrive in the
camps in Chad. They had remained
internally displaced, then travelled long distances.
Consequently, by the time they met w estern observers,
victims had either died of their wounds or they had healed.
Many also testified to Aegis how they had witnessed
members of the family being killed. In random groups of
refugees in the camps; over half of the men, women and
children had always seen a family member killed during
attacks on the villages. Most of these had lost multiple
members of their families.
Analysis of more comprehensive interviews carried out for
the United States State Department report found that 61%
of refugees reported having seen a member of their family
killed and 67% reported seeing a non-family member
killed. 34
In attacks on villages there has often been an emphasis
on the killing of the male population. There have been
instances reported of males being rounded up and
32 Eric Reeves,“ Darfur Mortality Update” , 8 October 2004
http://www.sepnet.org/index .php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=334&blog
Id=1 [Accessed 16 November 2004].
33 Save the Children spokesman Paul Hetherington, quoted by
Gethin Chamberlain in The Scotsman, 18 November 2004.
34 United States State Department (2004) Documenting Atrocities in
Darfur, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor and the
Bureau of Intelligence and Research, (State Publication 11182).
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