Former president of South Africa and the African National Congress, Thabo Mbeki has carried out a unique post-presidential role with a focus on the non-stop horror in Sudan, as head of the African Union High-Level Implementation Panel (AUHIP).
On 20 November last year, in an online address - available on YouTube - made to members of the Sudan Humanitarian Crisis Conference in Cairo, Mbeki uttered crucial words. Let South Africans take note of them. Speaking with factual accuracy about the recent slaughter of black Africans in Sudan, he said: when "Arabs took over the cities of El Geneina, Zalingei and Nyala" in West Darfur last year, residents had been "subjected to massacre, pillage and rape." He noted specifically that "commanders of the Rapid Support Forces and associated militia" had carried out "crimes against the people, ... especially Masalit", the members of a black African tribe living in the far west of Darfur.
He made the point that African and international efforts to halt the slaughter of black African civilians had been "woefully, woefully inadequate."
According to Mbeki, "Sudan is no stranger to humanitarian crisis. Indeed, its recent history has been punctuated by episodes of drought, famine and war-induced starvation. But never before have we witnessed a crisis at this scale."
Yet, only 45 days after Mbeki's damning statement about Arab racist slaughter in Darfur, the current president of South Africa and of ANC, Cyril Ramaphosa, received the deputy commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo - known in Arabic as Hemedti, or Hemetti, meaning "little Mohammed" - at a meeting in Pretoria, receiving Dagalo with a public handshake and warm smile, like a cousin or a long-lost friend.
Ramaphosa conducted himself as if he is ignorant of the fact that Dagalo - son of a chief of the Rizeigat tribe of the Arab Baggara people in Darfur, who have been responsible for some of the worst racist atrocities against black Africans over the past two decades - is leader of the Arab militia, the Janjaweed (meaning "devils on horseback").
Reading online from Dagalo's site on Wikipedia, anyone can see that according to Human Rights Watch and Sudan researcher Professor Eric Reeves, "the RSF was responsible for crimes against humanity, including systematic killings of civilians and rapes, in Darfur in 2014 and 2015. Hemetti was also involved in the 23 November 2004 attack on the village of Adwa which resulted in a massacre and rape and said that the attacks had been planned for months. According to Al Jazeera and [American news website] The Daily Beast, the Sudanese Transitional Military Council, headed by the RSF, holds major responsibility for the 3 June 2019 Khartoum massacre."
According to Darfur: A New History of a Long War by British researchers Julie Flint and Alex de Waal, published in a revised and updated edition in 2009 - ten years ahead of the Khartoum massacre, which followed a massacre at Adwa in Dafur in November 2005 - African Union officials had "interviewed the leader of one of the Rizeigat militias involved in the attack on Adwa, who had dawdled in the village. Mohamed Hamdan "Hemeti" ... admitted the government-militia alliance: he said the attack had been planned for several months, and that an Antonov [combat and military transport aircraft] and two helicopter gunships were involved." (p.144)
Citing verifiable sources, Wikipedia states that Dagalo "was one of the perpetrators of the Darfur genocide. Hemetti became a leader of the Janjaweed during the War in Darfur that started in 2003 and an 'amir' in the Border Guards in the same year. He was appointed brigadier–general in the newly created Rapid Support Forces (RSF) by the 1989–2019 government of Omar al-Bashir, who, as of 10 June 2019, is a fugitive indicted for war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide by the International Criminal Court (ICC)."
Wikipedia reports that Professor Reeves estimates "it is 'likely' that Hemetti has 'accumulated more Sudanese blood on his hands in conflict in Darfur and [in the conflict in] South Kordofan—as well as in Khartoum and elsewhere—than any other man in the country' and that Hemetti's management of the war was 'by means of serial atrocity crimes, including genocide and crimes against humanity'."
Wikipedia continues that "Hemetti used the RSF to take over gold mines and arrest rival Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal [then controller of the gold mines] in November 2017, with the result that Hemetti became the biggest gold trader in Sudan via his company al-Junaid. This gave him considerable financial power in Sudan since gold trade constituted forty percent of Sudanese exports in 2017. Al-Junaid (or Al Gunade), is run by Hemetti's brother Abdul Rahim Hamdan Dagalo, the deputy head of the RSF, and two of Abdul Rahim's sons."
Much of Wikipedia's material on this issue comes from Sudan researcher Alex de Waal, in an article headed "Sudan crisis: The ruthless mercenaries who run the country for gold", available on the online site of BBC News dated 20 July 2019.
The BBC article states that "Hemedti's rivalry with Hilal intensified when gold was discovered at Jebel Amir in North Darfur state in 2012.
"Coming at just the moment when Sudan was facing an economic crisis because South Sudan had broken away, taking with it 75% of the country's oil, this seemed like a godsend. ...
By 2017, gold sales accounted for 40% of Sudan's exports. And Hemedti was keen to control them.
He already owned some mines and had set up a trading company known as al-Junaid. But when Hilal challenged Mr Bashir one more time, denying the government access to Jebel Amir's mines, Hemedti's RSF went on the counter-attack.
In November 2017, his forces arrested Hilal, and the RSF took over Sudan's most lucrative gold mines.
Hemedti overnight became the country's biggest gold trader and - by controlling the border with Chad and Libya - its biggest border guard. ...
By this time, the RSF's strength had grown tenfold. Its command structure didn't change: all are Darfurian Arabs, its generals sharing the Dagalo name.
With 70,000 men and more than 10,000 armed pick-up trucks, the RSF became Sudan's de facto infantry, the one force capable of controlling the streets of the capital, Khartoum, and other cities.
Through gold and officially sanctioned mercenary activity, Hemedti came to control Sudan's largest "political budget" - money that can be spent on private security, or any activity, without needing to give an account.
Run by his relatives, the Al-Junaid company had become a vast conglomerate covering investment, mining, transport, car rental, and iron and steel. ...
By the time Mr Bashir was ousted in April [2019], Hemedti was one of the richest men in Sudan - probably with more ready cash than any other politician - and was at the centre of a web of patronage, secret security deals, and political payoffs. It is no surprise that he moved swiftly to take the place of his fallen patron.
Hemedti has moved fast, politically and commercially. ...
Hemedti is a wholly 21st Century phenomenon: a military-political entrepreneur, whose paramilitary business empire transgresses territorial and legal boundaries.
Today, this semi-lettered market trader and militiaman is more powerful than any army general or civilian leader in Sudan. The political marketplace he commands is more dynamic than any fragile institutions of civilian government."
The "Hemedti" site on Wikipedia states that both Hemedti and General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, his rival in the current civil war between Arab military commanders in Sudan, "had ties to the Putin regime in Russia. According to Business Insider, 'The two generals helped Russian President Vladimir Putin exploit Sudan's gold resources to help buttress Russian finances against Western sanctions and fund his war in Ukraine.' ...
"... Hemetti also visited Russia during Ukraine's invasion to sign a partnership deal with the Wagner Group in exchange of giving them the license to mine gold in Sudan. General Hamdan built an advanced and better equipped paramilitary forces than the Sudanese military with the wealth, that is distributed within livestock, real estate and private security firms, with much of the money held in Dubai [the headquarters of Hamas]."
The question is: With what moral right did President Ramaphosa meet this man in such a friendly fashion on 4 January this year?
The presidency reported this meeting, stating that Ramaphosa had "welcomed the briefing from General Dagalo and commended the central role of the African Union and IGAD [Intergovernmental Authority on Development in East Africa] under the chairship of Djibouti in mediating between the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF [headed by al-Burhan]) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), and participation of the people of Sudan, and civil society in finding a lasting solution to the security and political challenges.
"President Ramaphosa expressed South Africa’s support for the imminent face to face dialogue between General Dagalo and General Burhan and reiterated the need for an immediate ceasefire, and the dialogue towards permanent cessation of hostilities."
This was all very well. But it completely ignores the racist and genocidal slaughter of black Africans carried out by Dagalo and his RSF, which former president Thabo Mbeki identified in his address to the Cairo conference on 20 November last year.
The moral and political issue defining Dagalo can be identified from a passage on Sudan's history by South Sudan's, and former Sudan's, most eminent scholar, Francis M Deng, in a paper, "Sudan: From genocidal wars to the frontiers of peace and unity", delivered to the Institute of International Humanitarian Affairs at Fordham University in the United States on 3 September 2006, and re-published in an extract in his book, Journey of Ideas: Annotated Works of Francis M Deng (Africa World Books, 2023). There Deng writes:
The conflicts in the Sudan were based on the mismanagement of diversity which accorded some racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural groups the dignity of being the in-groups, who enjoyed the rights of citizenship, while other groups were discriminated against, marginalized, excluded, and denigrated as outgroups. (p.98)
Ramaphosa appears to have made no comment to Dagalo about the apartheid basis of the regime of Muslim Arabs in Sudan, and its never-ending "massacre, pillage and rape" of black Africans, to use the words of former president Thabo Mbeki.
Ramaphosa, too, is "woefully, woefully inadequate".
