Two decades after the vow of “Never Again,” the same villages burn, the same people flee, and the same perpetrators walk free. Inaction is not neutrality — it is the final weapon of genocide.

I. Introduction: The return of an old war

Twenty years ago, Darfur’s name became synonymous with genocide. Images of scorched villages, mass graves, and endless streams of displaced families shocked the conscience of the world. Global leaders swore that such horrors would “never again” be allowed to happen.

Today, those vows lie in tatters. Darfur burns once more. The same communities are hunted, the same villages reduced to ash, and the same patterns of mass killing and forced displacement unfold — often at the hands of the very actors, or their successors, who perpetrated the original crimes.

The war that reignited in 2023 is not a new conflict. It is the continuation of an unfinished crime — waged with renewed ferocity, under the gaze of an international system that mistakes inaction for neutrality, and silence for diplomacy.

II. Geography and geopolitics: The anatomy of a powder keg

Darfur spans a vast expanse of western Sudan — 493,000 square kilometres, larger than the United Kingdom and nearly the size of France — and is home to a rich mosaic of almost 80 tribes and ethnic groups divided between nomads and sedentary communities.

It borders Chad, Libya, and the Central African Republic, positioning it at a volatile crossroads where the instability of neighboring states seeps across porous frontiers.

This location has made Darfur not only a Sudanese crisis but a strategic fault line in Africa’s security landscape. It serves as a corridor for arms smuggling, illicit trade, and irregular migration from the Sahel to the Mediterranean. Beneath its soil lie untapped reserves of gold, uranium, and potentially vast oil fields — resources that make it both a prize and a battleground.

Its five states — North, South, East, West, and Central Darfur — are home to roughly eight million people. For decades, they have been caught between resource wealth that attracts exploitation and a political center that has long neglected the region’s development and security.

III. The ICC’s warning: History on repeat

In 2023, the International Criminal Court (ICC) reopened its investigation into atrocities in Darfur. ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan, addressing the UN Security Council (UNSC), described “the same criminal patterns” that first brought the case before the court 20 years earlier: targeted killings, the weaponization of starvation, and systematic sexual violence.

Mr. Khan spoke of a “tragic continuity” — a new generation living the same horrors endured by their parents — and warned that without enforcing long-ignored arrest warrants, the cycle of impunity would continue to destabilize Darfur and spread suffering across the region.

IV. Political unity and the role of the Juba Peace Agreement

More than two years into Sudan’s war against the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) militia, the national front remains resolute: defeat the insurgent force and restore stability. Among its ranks, the signatories of the Juba Peace Agreement (JPA) 2020, including the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM), have emphasized that implementing the accord in full is not a secondary concern but a strategic necessity for lasting peace.

Speaking to Brown Land News, SLM adviser Dr. Hussein Arko Minnawi — brother of Sudan Liberation Army leader and Darfur Governor Mr. Minni Arko Minnawi — stressed that the agreement’s protocols address both Sudan’s broader national crisis and Darfur’s specific grievances: the return of displaced persons and refugees, resolution of land disputes (hawakeer — traditional landholdings of Darfur’s indigenous communities, recognised and protected under historical custom and inseparable from their identity, livelihoods, and political legitimacy), and the integration of former fighters into the national army under agreed security arrangements, in line with the Disarmament, Demobilization, and Reintegration (DDR) protocol. Disputes over “hawakeer” have long been a flashpoint in Darfur’s conflict, with attempts to reallocate or occupy these ancestral lands often igniting fierce resistance and deepening ethnic tensions.

Fulfilment of these commitments, he argued, would complete the SLM’s transition into a civilian political party and cement the JPA as a cornerstone of both reconciliation and the broader war effort against the RSF.

V. Roots of a catastrophe

Darfur’s descent into war was decades in the making. By the early 2000s, political neglect, economic marginalization, and ethnic discrimination had pushed grievances to breaking point. In 2003, the SLM and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) rose against the Khartoum government, demanding development and an end to discrimination.

The Bashir regime responded with overwhelming violence, unleashing the Janjaweed militias to wage a campaign of terror. From 2003 to 2016, hundreds of thousands were killed, millions displaced, and the region locked into cycles of mass atrocities. While international outrage led to peace talks and the deployment of a joint UN–African Union peacekeeping mission, no durable settlement emerged. Darfur remained militarized, impoverished, and primed for renewed conflict.

VI. The Janjaweed legacy and RSF’s crimes

A September 9, 2015, Human Rights Watch report, Men Without Mercy, documented a catalogue of abuses by the RSF — heirs to the Janjaweed militias. The crimes included forced displacement of entire communities, torture, extrajudicial executions, gang rape, and the destruction of essential survival infrastructure such as wells and food stores. Families’ collective wealth — particularly livestock — was looted, erasing livelihoods in one of the harshest environments on earth.

The report, based on testimony from 151 survivors who fled to Chad and South Sudan, recounted civilians killed for refusing to leave their homes, surrender livestock, or allow the rape of family members. Another 21 witnesses from Qolo and surrounding villages described widespread killings, sexual violence, beatings, and looting — all part of a coordinated campaign of terror.

Human Rights Watch urged the UNSC, the African Union Peace and Security Council, and UNAMID to act decisively: hold perpetrators accountable, expand humanitarian access, provide medical and psychological care for survivors, cooperate fully with the ICC, and prosecute those responsible for grave international crimes.

VII. A new front: Demographic engineering as a weapon of war

More than two decades later, the same patterns of violence persist — but with an even darker strategic aim. The RSF now stands accused of engaging in deliberate demographic engineering and ethnic cleansing. According to Dr. Hussein Arko Minnawi, the militia’s long-term plan envisions resettling Arab tribes scattered across the Sahel — from Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, Libya, Nigeria, and Cameroon — onto the ancestral lands of Darfur’s indigenous communities.

Many of these tribes, he notes, owe allegiance not to the states in which they reside but to their transnational ethnic identity. This strategy would directly target the “'hawakeer“. By seizing and reallocating these lands to outsiders, the RSF militia would erase communities physically and dismantle the very foundations of Darfur’s social and territorial order.

Dr. Hussein Minnawi warns that such a transformation, executed through mass killings and forced displacement, would irreversibly alter Darfur’s demographic and cultural landscape — ensuring that the region’s original inhabitants are not only dispossessed but permanently replaced.

A governor’s warning

The Governor of Darfur, Commander Minni Arko Minnawi, stated that the RSF militia is sustained by generous support from particular foreign states and reinforced by mercenaries from more than a dozen countries — a flagrant breach of international law and a direct assault on Sudan’s sovereignty.

In a statement issued on his official Facebook page on August 08, 2025, Mr. Minnawi accused the militia of enforcing a suffocating siege on El Fasher, torching the Zamzam camp for displaced persons, and committing heinous crimes against defenseless civilians.

He vowed that this “exceptional situation will not last long,” affirming his determination to liberate the besieged, restore national dignity, and mend the torn fabric of Darfur’s society. Renewing his pledge to his people, Mr. Minnawi declared they would press on in the struggle until victory is secured — that pride will remain the exclusive preserve of this noble people, and that betrayal and conspiracy will end in defeat.

VIII. After the revolution: Violence without restraint

The ouster of Omar al-Bashir in 2019 was heralded as the dawn of a new political era. Yet the RSF remained intact — a parallel army beyond complete civilian or military control.

On June 3, 2019, during the brutal dispersal of the Khartoum sit-in, RSF fighters massacred more than 100 people, injured over 700, and committed at least 70 rapes, according to medical testimony reported by The Guardian. The operation bore the hallmarks of a force operating with total impunity.

Fast-forward to April 2023: the RSF’s violence has escalated to an industrial scale. Its offensives in El Geneina and El Fasher have driven civilian casualties to levels that eclipse even the worst years of the early 2000s.

Since the outbreak of the Darfur conflict in 2003, the death toll has risen relentlessly alongside vast waves of displacement. Under the National Congress Party regime, international organizations estimated that more than 300,000 people were killed — a grim benchmark in the history of atrocity. But after April 2023, that number has tripled — or more — as the RSF has deliberately targeted civilians not only in Darfur but across Sudan. This is not collateral damage; it is a deliberate, calculated campaign to erase entire communities.

IX. Conclusion: The world’s silence as complicity

Darfur’s agony is not the product of chaos. It is the outcome of deliberate strategy, executed with precision, sustained by impunity, and enabled by the passivity — or political convenience — of the international community.

Two decades after the world swore “Never Again,” the killing fields are again red with blood, the displacement camps overflow once more, and the perpetrators move freely between battlefields and foreign capitals.

The lesson is stark: without decisive action to dismantle the RSF’s war-making capacity, enforce long-ignored arrest warrants, and protect civilians on the ground, Darfur will remain an open grave in the conscience of humanity — and history will remember today’s silence as complicity.

Editors’ Note: A call to conscience

The evidence is overwhelming. The patterns are undeniable. The names and faces of the victims are no longer statistics but living indictments of our collective failure. Darfur is not a humanitarian accident — it is a crime in progress, and those with the power to stop it have chosen hesitation over resolve.

Every day of inaction strengthens the perpetrators and deepens the graves of the innocent. Empty statements, choreographed summits, and carefully worded communiqués are not acts of diplomacy — they are acts of complicity.

The question for the international community is no longer whether it knows what is happening in Darfur, but whether it is willing to bear the moral and political cost of letting it continue. That cost will not be measured only in Sudanese lives, but in the credibility of every institution that once claimed to stand against genocide.

History has already recorded what happens when the world looks away. This time, the record is still being written — and so is the judgment.

By: Mohamed Saad Kamil, Editor-in-Chief & Sabah Al-Makki, Assistant Editor

(Source: Brown Land News)