Hemeti Needs No Help in his Public Relations Campaign: Why is Associated Press Giving it to Him?
Eric Reeves | May 23, 2019 | https://wp.me/s45rOG-9350
Hamdan Dagalo (Hemeti) is at once the greatest threat to the civilian transformation of governance in Sudan—and evidently an expert in “public relations,” including in particular misrepresenting himself and his actions, recent and more distant.
But Hemeti hardly needs the help of Associated Press and other news organizations that have now descended on the “Sudan story” with haste and often appalling ignorance. I select only one recent example, but it is representative in its ignorance of the realities of the Darfur genocide in which Hemeti was a critical militia instrument of the al-Bashir regime.
In a relatively short May 22, 2019 (updated) dispatch (notably with a dateline of Cairo, not Khartoum) Associated Press (authors Samy Magdy and Joseph Krauss) make a series of comments reflecting disturbing ignorance of the Darfur genocide and its grim 16-year history. Most notably, they claim:
Hemedti, who declined AP requests for an interview, has not been implicated in the atrocities carried out in Darfur in 2003 and 2004, when the government-backed Janjaweed rampaged across the region, torching villages and killing and raping ethnic Africans. [the entire dispatch appears below]
They give no source for this exoneration of Hemeti from responsibility for atrocities in the early phase of the Darfur genocide, but they are quite simply in error. The work of those who have actually spent time on the ground in Darfur, and done serious research, makes clear how consequential this error is. In Darfur: A New History of a Long War (Zed Books 2008), Julie Flint and Alex de Waal report:
The first attack [by militia/Sudan Armed Forces in a new and larger campaign of November 2004] was Adwa [South Darfur]… [Adwa] had been attacked and looted on 18 March [2004] with six villagers killed, according to one of the sheikhs in the area. The November attack was larger and the villagers counted 126 dead, including thirty-six children. They said the militia burned some bodies and threw others in wells to hide the evidence of the massacred. Human Rights Watch wrote, “The offensive was extremely well planned and systematic in its approach… The methodical way in which these strategic locations were attacked illustrates the overall coordination role of the Sudanese government; the offensive was apparently directed from Khartoum.”
Of particular note, Flint and de Waal go on to report:
AU officials interviewed the leaders of one of the Rizeigat militias involved in the attack on Adwa, who had dawdled in the village. Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti,” [who] had attacked Kidingeer village in October 2002 admitted the government alliance: he said the attacks had been planned for several months.
Yes, this is the same Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti” that Associated Press exonerates out of historical ignorance.
We learn more about this attack on Adwa from distinguished, courageous and award-winning journalist Al-Haj Warrag in a July 28, 2010 article in “African Arguments”:
On 23 November 2004 at 6:00 a.m., the village of Adwa in South Darfur was attacked by the Sudanese army and the Janjaweed militia. Most villagers were still asleep, or had woken up for the morning prayer, while two helicopter gunships and an Antonov plane approached the village. Meanwhile, heavily armed militiamen entered the village with land cruisers… All the homes in the villages were burnt down. Many villagers fled into the mountains, but several were captured. Men were immediately shot, while women were kept in detention for two days. Young girls were repeatedly raped by the attackers in the presence of their mothers. All the victims of the attack belonged to the Fur tribe.
Perhaps it doesn’t matter to Associated Press or its journalists or its fact checkers that they have engaged in such egregious misrepresentation of Lt. General Hemeti—but it certainly does to Darfuris, who feel increasingly marginalized with the intense “Khartoum-centric” focus of news reporting. This focus leads Associated Press to conclude the dispatch as follows:
Some 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were forcibly displaced in the early years of the conflict, before the violence gradually declined.
The number of displaced in Darfur has been politicized by both the UN and Khartoum; but long after the early years of the war, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported in 2017, if rather obscured, the number of IDPs in Darfur as, in fact, 2.7 million—and this does not included what the UN High Commission for Refugees estimates as more than 330,000 Darfuri refugees in eastern Chad, still too fearful to attempt to return to their villages and lands.
As for a mortality figure of 300,000 dead, Associated Press fails to note that this UN estimate was made in April 2008—more than eleven years ago. The violence has been unrelenting, and indeed from 2013 to the present (with the creation of Hemeti’s Rapid Support Forces) there has been a highly significant increase in violence and violent mortality, despite claims to the contrary by the UN and African Union, parties desperate to withdraw their failing “hybrid protection force (the UN/AU Mission in Darfur) and bill this as justified by the “peace that has come to Darfur.”
There has been no UN attempt to update this figure or provide any of the mortality data it has acquired. Using open source data and all extant reports, I have attempted to provide such an update, and conclude that a much more realistic estimate of the number of deaths, directly and indirectly caused by violence is 600,000.
“QUANTIFYING GENOCIDE: Darfur Mortality Update, 6 August 2010 (updated November 2016),” Eric Reeves | http://sudanreeves.org/2017/01/05/quantifying-genocide-darfur-mortality-update-august-6-2010/
Again, Hemeti needs no help in his efforts to sanitize his past existence as a génocidaire, an impossible effort in any event given his responsibility for the massive crimes in Darfur since 2013, crimes Associated Press seems willing to ignore by speaking of “Some 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were forcibly displaced in the early years of the conflict, before the violence gradually declined.
For a record of the violence that has occurred in the period of “decline,” see:
“Scorched Earth, Poisoned Air: Sudanese Government Forces Ravage Jebel Marra, Darfur,” Amnesty International, September 26, 2016 | https://www.amnestyusa.org/reports/scorched-earth-poisoned-air-sudanese-government-forces-ravage-jebel-marra-darfur
“‘Men With No Mercy’: Rapid Support Forces Attacks Against Civilians in Darfur, Sudan,” Human Rights Watch, September 9, 2015 | https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/09/09/men-no-mercy/rapid-support-forces-attacks-against-civilians-darfur-sudan
“Mass Rape in North Darfur: Sudanese Army Attacks against Civilians in Tabit,” Human Rights Watch, February 11, 2015 | https://www.hrw.org/report/2015/02/11/mass-rape-north-darfur/sudanese-army-attacks-against-civilians-tabit
“Remote-Control Breakdown: Sudanese paramilitary forces and pro-government militias,” Small Arms Survey (Switzerland), April 2017 | http://www.smallarmssurveysudan.org/fileadmin/docs/issue-briefs/HSBA-IB-27-Sudanese-paramilitary-forces.pdf
“Multilateral Damage: The Impact of EU Migration Policies on Central Saharan Routes,” Clingendael, September 2018 | https://www.clingendael.org/pub/2018/multilateral-damage/
“‘Changing the Demography”: Violent Expropriation and Destruction of Farmlands in Darfur, November 2014 – November 2015,” Eric Reeves, author; May Baca research and editing, December 2015—includes framing analysis, extensive data spreadsheet covering all reported incidents of violence against farmers and farmland in Darfur, as well as a detailed mapping of these data onto three maps encompassing all of Darfur (monograph translated into Arabic) | http://wp.me/p45rOG-1P4
“Continuing Mass Rape of Girls in Darfur: The most heinous crime generates no international outrage” | January 2016 | Eric Reeves, author| Maya Baca, research and editing—includes framing analysis, extensive data spreadsheet for 2014 and 2015, as well as detailed mapping of these data onto three maps encompassing all of Darfur (monograph translated into Arabic) | http://wp.me/p45rOG-1QG
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General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo’s Path of Power Ran Through Darfur
Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, had led the so-called Rapid Support Forces on a series of counterinsurgency campaigns in Darfur and other restive provinces. He is the second most powerful man in Sudan right now.
Associated Press (Cairo), May 22, 2019 | By SAMY MAGDY and JOSEPH KRAUSS
In April 2015, President Omar al-Bashir traveled to the heart of Sudan’s conflict-ravaged Darfur region to congratulate one of his hand-picked commanders on a recent victory over rebels.
Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, had led the so-called Rapid Support Forces on a series of counterinsurgency campaigns in Darfur and other restive provinces. The paramilitary force grew out of the notorious Janjaweed militias, and rights groups say forces under his command used many of the militias’ brutal tactics.
“I signed the list of promotions that I received from you without even looking at it,” al-Bashir told a cheering crowd, addressing Dagalo, as he stood atop a Land Cruiser in the sweltering heat, according to a contemporary account of the rally.
Four years later, al-Bashir is imprisoned in the capital, Khartoum, and Hemedti, who comes from a camel-trading family in a remote province, is the second most powerful man in Sudan.
He is the deputy head of the military council that assumed power after removing al-Bashir from office in April, following four months of mass protests. At 44, he is also the youngest member of the council. He says he refused orders from al-Bashir to fire on the protesters, and he praised them as recently as last weekend, saying “we want the democracy they are talking about.”
Many see him as an ally against the Islamic movement that orchestrated al-Bashir’s 1989 coup and underpinned his regime. Hemedti has supplied ground forces to the Saudi-led coalition fighting Iran-aligned rebels in Yemen and can count on the support of the Saudis, the United Arab Emirates and Egypt, which also hope to sideline the Islamists.
But his meteoric rise is closely linked to the ongoing conflict in his native Darfur, where his forces are accused of continuing the scorched-earth campaign against rebels that al-Bashir launched in 2003, and for which the president was indicted for war crimes and genocide by the International Criminal Court.
Hemedti, who declined AP requests for an interview, has not been implicated in the atrocities carried out in Darfur in 2003 and 2004, when the government-backed Janjaweed rampaged across the region, torching villages and killing and raping ethnic Africans.
Some 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were forcibly displaced in the early years of the conflict, before the violence gradually declined.