TRANSCRIPT
Warning: Distressing Content
Sound of gunfire and militants yelling
Back in April, a displacement camp in Sudan was raided by militants in one of the most shocking episodes in more than two-and-a-half years of civil war.
The famine-ravaged Zamzam camp in the Darfur region was not considered a military target, but it didn't stop the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces from storming the site, which was home to around half a million displaced people.
A new report from the United Nations' Human Rights Office has found this attack saw more than 1,000 civilians killed by the R-S-F.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk says, during the takeover, the R-S-F directed attacks against civilians, conducting mass killings, rapes, torture and abductions as people attempted to flee.
"Over 1,000 civilians were killed, 319 of them summarily executed - some in their homes, and others in the main market, in schools, health facilities and mosques. And more than 400,000 people were displaced once again."
The findings are based on interviews conducted in July with 155 survivors and witnesses who fled to the neighbouring country of Chad.
One of them testified that eight people hiding in a room in the camp were killed by R-S-F fighters who inserted rifles through a window and shot at the group.
Mr Turk says they also found a disturbing pattern of sexual violence.
"At least 104 people, including 75 women, 26 girls and three boys, most of them from the Zaghawa ethnic group, were subjected to gruesome sexual violence, including rape and gang rape, and sexual slavery. Sexual violence appears to have been deliberately used to inflict terror on the community."
Back in August, SBS spoke to Mohamed Douda, a Zaghawa man who was trapped inside the city of Al-Fasher, which was also under siege by the R-S-F.
Mr Douda had been the spokesperson for the Zamzam camp before the raid and was shot in the foot during the attack.
He says the fighters turned their attack on the camp’s last remaining medical clinic, killing at least nine Relief International aid workers, a claim supported by the aid group.
"The entire Relief International staff have been wiped out including the camp director and nine other employees. I found their bodies stacked, each with a bullet wound to the head."
Volker Turk says these executions and acts of sexual violence against civilians could be war crimes and are consistent with the Rapid Support Force's behaviour in the raid on Al-Fasher later in the year.
"Such deliberate killing of civilians or persons hors de combat may constitute the war crime of murder. There must be an impartial, through and effective investigation into the attack on the camp, and those responsible for serious violations of international law must be punished. These horrific patterns of violations - committed with impunity - are consistent with what my office has repeatedly documented, including during the RSF takeover of Al-Fasher in October."
The United States government and several human rights organisations have accused the paramilitary group of genocidal acts in Darfur.
The R-S-F did not immediately respond to a request for
comment on this story. The group has previously denied harming civilians and claims of genocide.
Mohamed Douda escaped Zamzam to the famine-stricken city of Al-Fasher which was blockaded by the R-S-F for 18 months.
He says the R-S-F routinely attack civilians.
"They kill innocent people, they rape. So if the Rapid Support Forces control Al-Fasher, surely I will die and any other people like me will die."
Mohamed Douda's friends and family confirmed that, when the RSF overran the city of Al-Fasher in early November, he was executed.
The R-S-F has been accused of summarily executing and kidnapping tens of thousands of people in the takeover by independent observers at the Yale Humanitarian Lab.
Head of the research lab, Nathaniel Raymond, tells independent news outlet Democracy Now that the R-S-F forces are now attempting to cover up these alleged war crimes.
"What we're seeing through very high resolution satellite imagery is at least 140 large piles of bodies that appeared at the end of October into early November and we see basically a pattern of activity by the Rapid Support Forces that indicates they've been burning and burying bodies for almost the better part of five weeks. Meanwhile, we see none of the pattern of life that we expect to see in a place with civilians."
