Ethnic Minorities Face Targeted Violence in Sudan’s Conflicts

Introduction

Sudan is home to one of the most complex ethnic landscapes in Africa, with more than 500 distinct tribes and ethnic groups. The country's non-Arab African communities—including the Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa, Nuba, Ingessana, Beja, and numerous smaller groups—have faced systematic persecution and violence throughout Sudan's post-colonial history. The Darfur genocide of the early 2000s brought this persecution to international attention for the first time, resulting in the first ICC arrest warrants ever issued for a sitting head of state. Yet the targeting of ethnic minorities in Sudan did not begin with Darfur and has not ended with al-Bashir's removal. The war that began in April 2023 has seen the resumption of ethnically targeted mass violence in Darfur, perpetrated by the same forces—under different names—that carried out the original genocide. This article examines the patterns and legal dimensions of ethnic minority persecution in Sudan.

Historical Background: Colonial Division and Post-Independence Marginalisation

British colonial administration of Sudan created and entrenched administrative hierarchies that favoured the Arab riverine elites of the north while marginalising the non-Arab populations of Darfur, the south, the Nuba Mountains, and the east. The artificial borders drawn at independence in 1956 enclosed an extraordinarily diverse population within a state whose ruling class consistently promoted an Arab-Islamic identity as the basis of national belonging, excluding non-Arab communities from political power and resource allocation.

Governments in Khartoum pursued policies of Arabisation—promoting Arabic language in schools and public life at the expense of indigenous languages—and Islamisation, applying pressure on non-Muslim communities to convert. Land policies systematically favoured Arab pastoralist communities over indigenous African sedentary farmers in Darfur, creating tensions that were weaponised by successive governments into large-scale violence. The armed movements that emerged in Darfur in the early 2000s—the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM)—arose directly from this marginalisation.

The Darfur Genocide: Patterns of Targeting

When the SLA and JEM launched attacks on government positions in Darfur in 2003, the Khartoum government responded with a campaign of mass atrocities targeting the non-Arab civilian population. The Janjaweed—Arab militias provided with weapons, logistical support, and operational coordination by the Sudanese Armed Forces and government—attacked villages identified as belonging to Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa communities. The pattern of attacks was systematic and clearly ethnically targeted: Arab villages were left untouched while non-Arab villages were burned, wells were poisoned, crops were destroyed, and civilians were killed or forcibly displaced.

Sexual violence was deployed as a specific instrument of ethnic targeting. Women from non-Arab communities were gang-raped by Janjaweed fighters who simultaneously made derogatory ethnic slurs and statements about making their victims give birth to Arab children—a form of genocidal rape that has been documented in testimony submitted to the ICC and in reports by Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights Watch. This intent to destroy the ethnic group in part through reproductive coercion is one of the elements supporting the legal characterisation of the campaign as genocide.

The UN Commission of Inquiry on Darfur, reporting in 2005, found that international crimes had been committed but stopped short of a finding of genocide, concluding that it could not establish the specific intent to destroy the ethnic groups in whole or in part. The ICC, however, disagreed: in 2010, the Pre-Trial Chamber issued a warrant for al-Bashir specifically for genocide against the Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa peoples—the only genocide charge the court has issued against any individual in connection with Darfur.

The Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile: Continuing Marginalisation

While Darfur attracted the most international attention, parallel campaigns of ethnic and political targeting were conducted against the Nuba people of South Kordofan and the Ingessana and other communities of the Blue Nile region. From 2011 onwards, following the independence of South Sudan and the activation of armed opposition by the Sudan People's Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), the Sudanese Armed Forces conducted extensive aerial bombardment of civilian areas in these regions, using Soviet-era Antonov cargo aircraft to drop barrel bombs with no targeting capability onto villages, markets, and hospitals.

Humanitarian access to affected areas was almost entirely blocked by the government, creating conditions of acute food insecurity. The targeting of agricultural lands and the destruction of markets and health facilities was documented by the UN and international NGOs as constituting deliberate collective punishment of populations perceived to support the SPLM-N. The communities affected were overwhelmingly non-Arab Africans who had long faced discrimination in land rights, government employment, and educational opportunities.

2023 Resumption: Masalit Massacre in El Geneina

When the RSF—reconstituted from the former Janjaweed under the command of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemedti), himself implicated in Darfur atrocities—captured El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur state, in June 2023, the massacre of the Masalit community followed within days. UN investigators documented the killing of between 10,000 and 15,000 Masalit civilians in El Geneina and surrounding areas, with RSF fighters and allied Arab militias specifically targeting individuals identified as Masalit. The governor of West Darfur, Khamis Abbakar, was killed by RSF forces after publicly accusing the RSF of genocide against the Masalit.

Comparison: Ethnic Targeting in Sudan

International Legal Framework

The Genocide Convention (1948) defines genocide as acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group. Sudan is a party to the Genocide Convention and is obligated both to prohibit genocide domestically and to cooperate with international efforts to hold perpetrators accountable. The ICC's genocide charges against al-Bashir represent the definitive international legal assessment of the Darfur campaign by the world's foremost international criminal court.

Sudan is also a party to the ICCPR, which under Articles 2 and 26 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, and ethnicity, and requires equal protection of the law for all persons regardless of these characteristics. The systematic economic marginalisation of non-Arab communities, combined with state-sponsored violence against them, constitutes multiple violations of Sudan's ICCPR obligations.

The Rome Statute's definition of crimes against humanity under Article 7 includes persecution on racial, ethnic, or national grounds when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population. The documented pattern of targeting non-Arab ethnic communities in Darfur and other regions satisfies this definition, as confirmed by the ICC's own Pre-Trial Chambers in multiple decisions.

Expert Analysis

"What is happening in Darfur in 2023 is not new. It is the same crime, committed by the same people, against the same victims, for the same reason—and with the same international response of too little, too late. The RSF is the Janjaweed. Hemedti is a Janjaweed commander. The victims are Masalit, Fur, Zaghawa—the same communities who suffered genocide twenty years ago. The only difference is that now the perpetrators have artillery and armoured vehicles instead of horses. The international community has known about this for two decades and has failed to protect these communities. That failure is not abstract: it is measured in bodies."

Alex de Waal, Executive Director, World Peace Foundation, Tufts University, testimony to the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee (2023)

Conclusion

The persecution of ethnic minorities in Sudan represents one of the most sustained and serious patterns of mass atrocity documented in the post-World War II era. The Darfur genocide of the early 2000s, the parallel campaigns in the Nuba Mountains and Blue Nile, and the resumption of mass killing of non-Arab communities in 2023 constitute a continuous pattern of state-directed ethnic targeting spanning more than two decades. International legal accountability, while partially engaged through the ICC, has been fundamentally inadequate: al-Bashir remains undelivered to The Hague, and the forces responsible for both the original genocide and the 2023 massacres continue to operate with impunity. Members of targeted ethnic communities—Fur, Masalit, Zaghawa, Nuba, and others—who have fled Sudan have compelling claims to refugee protection under the 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol, on grounds of race, nationality, and membership of a particular social group.