Genocide returns to Darfur

Hanan Khamis just wanted to get to safety. In mid-June, after surviving weeks of gunfire and rockets directed at the Masalit, a black African ethnic group, she fled el-Geneina, the capital of the state of West Darfur in Sudan. Hoisting her 23-month-old baby boy, Sabir, onto her back she started walking towards Chad. Yet fighters wearing the uniforms of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) soon surrounded them. They dragged men to the side of the road and told the women to run. Before she could do so, a gunman wrenched open the shawl on her back that covered Sabir. “No men can escape to Chad,” he shouted. Then he shot her baby in the head.

In Chad a humanitarian worker identifies four other mothers who tell of similar horrors. One says she was stopped at a roadblock where Arab militiamen murdered the men in her group. When they saw her 15-month-old son strapped to her, they shot him dead as he clung to her. The bullet burst through his tiny body and into hers, where it remains lodged. “If that isn’t a genocidal act, I don’t know what is,” says Mukesh Kapila, a former UN chief in Sudan who blew the whistle on massacres in Darfur 20 years ago.