On May 6, 2004, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report alleging that the Sudanese government and its allied “Janjaweed” militias had committed systemic attacks on the civilian populations of the African Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa ethnic groups that amounted to “ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity”.

The government and its Janjaweed allies, the report said, deliberately slaughtered thousands of Fur, Masalit and Zaghawa; raped women; and demolished villages, food stockpiles and other critical supplies.

On May 9, 2024, almost 20 years to the day it had exposed genocide in Darfur, the HRW released another report titled “The Massalit Will Not Come Home”: Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes Against Humanity in El Geneina, West Darfur, Sudan.

In it, the HRW alleged the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – the formalised version of the Janjaweed militia – and allied paramilitaries have committed a new genocide in el-Geneina, the capital city of Sudan’s West Darfur state, from April to November last year, killing thousands of people and leaving hundreds of thousands as refugees.

And the carnage in Darfur is far from over. The HRW’s Belkis Wille decried the RSF’s ongoing siege of North Darfur’s capital, el-Fasher, and called for an end to “the new cycle of atrocities in Darfur” just last week on this very page.

The RSF and its allies are still able to systematically kill, maim and displace Darfuris with near complete impunity because Africa’s leaders have repeatedly missed opportunities to deliver justice to the region over the years.

Indeed, the atrocities we are witnessing in Darfur and across Sudan today could well have been avoided if the architects and perpetrators of the genocidal atrocities of the 2000s were brought to book in the first place.

Countless opportunities for justice have been missed in the past 20 years.

In 2004, then-United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan established the International Commission of Inquiry on violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law in Darfur.

The commission’s damning........

© Al Jazeera