The prosecutor for the international criminal court has said he is seeking arrest warrants for people accused of atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur region, where the US and others have determined that a paramilitary group and its allies have perpetrated genocide.
Karim Khan told the UN security council in New York: “Criminality is accelerating in Darfur. Civilians are being targeted, women and girls are subjected to sexual violence, and entire communities are left in destruction.
“This is not just an assessment; it is a hard-edged analysis based on verified evidence.”
Khan said ICC lawyers had made material progress by interviewing witnesses who had fled Sudan.
Sudan plunged into conflict in mid-April 2023, when long-simmering tensions between its military and paramilitary leaders broke out in the capital, Khartoum, and spread to other regions, including the vast western Darfur region.
Two decades ago, Darfur became synonymous with genocide and war crimes, particularly by the notorious Janjaweed Arab militias, against populations that identify as central or east African. Up to 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were driven from their homes.
Khan said there were very clear echoes now of what happened 20 years ago. “The pattern of crimes, the perpetrators, the parties, tracked very closely with the same protagonists, the same targeted groups as existed in 2003,” he said. “It’s the same communities, the same groups suffering, a new generation suffering the same hell that has been endured by other generations of Darfuris, and this is tragic.”
He gave no details on Monday night on the specific crimes or the people the ICC wants arrested.
In January Khan told the council there were grounds to believe both government forces and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which was born out of the Janjaweed, may be committing war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide in Darfur.
Witnesses and rights groups have said the RSF targeted Masalit and other non-Arab groups in ethnically targeted attacks in Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state, in 2023.
In an attempt to show the impact the ICC could have on the crisis, Khan highlighted the completion of the recent trial of Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-al-Rahman, accused of 31 war crimes between 2003 and 2004 as the leader of the Janjaweed militia. He handed himself into custody in June 2020 and his trial in The Hague was completed last December pending sentence.
Arrest warrants remain outstanding for Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president until 2019, Abdel Hussein, the former president’s representative in Darfur and Abdel Harun, the former minister of the interior.
Khan’s intervention came as the UN secretary general, António Guterres, condemned the 24 January attack on the Saudi teaching hospital in El Fasher in North Darfur, the only functioning hospital in Darfur’s largest city.
At least 70 patients and their relatives were reportedly killed, and dozens more injured in what may have been a drone strike.
The Trump administration may adopt a more robust approach to Sudan, one of the five signatories to the Abraham accords, the normalisation deal with Israel that Donald Trump still cherishes.
The new US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, has confirmed he regards recent events in Darfur as a genocide, a term deployed by the Biden administration in its final days. Rubio also openly accused the United Arab Emirates of funding the RSF, which the UAE denies.
The US treasury last month imposed sanctions on Capital Tap Holding LL.C a UAE-based holding company that manages 50 companies in 10 countries. It also placed sanctions on Creative Python, a UAE firm that was described as the procurement arm of the RSF.
The UK foreign secretary, David Lammy, last week went to the Sudan-Chad border to be briefed on the humanitarian crisis, and plans to hold a foreign ministers’ meeting on Sudan in the next few months. He cannot describe what has happened as a genocide since UK policy is for courts rather than ministers to make such determinations.
The timetable for some diplomats may be overrun by events on the ground. Large numbers of RSF fighters have been seeking through January to encircle El Fasher, and are now less than 2 miles (3km) from the Zamzam camp for internally displaced people, according to a report from the Yale School of Public Health’s Humanitarian Research Lab, an acknowledged tracker of the war’s progress.
The Zamzam camp is home to as many as 500,000 displaced people, and the World Food Programme has been battling to prevent a full-scale famine there.
The Trump team is being urged to appoint a special envoy for the Horn of Africa, and to review its decision to freeze all US aid for six months pending a review, a move that Democratic senators such as Chris Murphy said would lead to malnourished babies in Sudan dying in weeks. The US was the largest donor of humanitarian aid to the Sudan response, providing more than $1.4bn (£1.1bn) in humanitarian assistance since October 2022, including more than $980m in USAid funding.
