Hemetti.. his apparition and speech

By Dr Omer Shurkian

An old English adage holds that ‘Two wrongs don’t make right’. Lt-Gen Hemetti’s unpredicted apparition on the 2nd of January 2024 has taken everybody by surprise. In his deceitful narration to social media on the events that led to the start of hostilities in the national capital, Khartoum, on the 15th of April 2023 and spread all over the country, he degraded and lamented his former protégé, Lt-Gen Burhan, who taught him the art of massacres in Darfur a few years ago, bearing in mind that they both are two sides of the same coin. Needless to say, Hemetti has persevered to paint himself as a returning prodigal son, who has appeared from obscurity to save the people of Sudan. He tried to blame the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF), which are as criminal with intent as his Rapid Support Forces (RSF), for the atrocities committed against civilians during the nine-month war so far.

It is a well-known fact that the gross violations of fundamental human rights by the Janjaweed-militia-turned RSF began since their inception in Darfur in 2013; these abuses have been going on unstoppably up to date. They include to mention but a few, the wanton murder of innocent, unarmed civilians, gang-rape of women, destruction of property, burning people alive, and setting houses and granaries able to inflict famine upon villagers and deprive them of their sustainable economy. In my conversation with a citizen from Darfur, he revealed to me that the Janjaweed militiamen used to pick up a child belonging to a condemned ethnic group, throw them up in the air and spear them as a target.

Worse still, Hemetti, in his public show, has praised himself as the prime mover of the political process that led to the signing of the Juba Peace Agreement. If that was the case, then why did his Forces persist in the killing of Darfurians in their villages, countryside, towns, and cities, as if there had never been a peace agreement? In actuality, the carnage continued in Darfur even more atrocious than ever before the civil war, for the theatre and the zones of slaughtering the natives of Darfur spread and spilled over into West and South Kordofan States.

The Nuba Mountains region has also witnessed some of the worst human rights violations by the RSF, including extrajudicial killings of farmers on their farms, pastoralists herding their cattle or travellers passing by. We have seen as recently as a few weeks ago what the RSF have done in Dilling, Tukma and now at at Habila, as the Arabs in the Nuba Mountains have joined the RSF en masse and embraced their doctrine of marauding, looting and killing innocent civilians based on their ethnicity. When such people whose only means of livelihood is robbed by the RSF or SAF for that matter, they cannot remain in the village or move to the town, for their lives would be insecure fron unemployment and security forces.

The SAF are not innocent either, for they are culpable for their own grave human rights violations since Sudan became acquainted with civil wars in August 1955. I have written extensively about the excesses of the SAF in two English-language books and several Arabic-language ones. Additionally, I have authored numerous articles and papers on the subject in newsletters and periodicals.

Hemetti might have been persevering to sugar-coat his words in his public apparition with a few lies here and there, however, the true character of the man is that he is a blood-thirsty ogre. His veneer expressions, therefore, belie the facts on the ground: the English people quite often express the test or the actual result of a thing in an axiomatic term that ‘the test of the pudding is in the eating ‘.

What Hemetti’s RSF have been doing along all these years, and they are doing right now as we write, can only explain two things: either he has no control whatsoever over his troops, or they have mutinied and he should, therefore, deal with them accordingly; or he condones what they are doing and, above all, he is quite happy with it.

Alas, Hemetti’s statement would carry nothing more than a mock-concern for Sudanese people’s lives and well-being.