Gulf states are mapping Khartoum’s future

Article from Chatham House, UK

Written by MOHAMED EL AASSAR

Senior Journalist at BBC Monitoring’s Middle East and North Africa team

Dated 29 July 2019

Gulf states are mapping Khartoum’s future

Fate of power sharing deal in Sudan rests in the hands of wealthy donors

Photo:  Sudanese deputy head of the Transitional Military Council, General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo

Since Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese leader, was forced to step down in April by pro-democracy street protesters, the governing Transitional Military Council has received strong backing from the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Bashir and Saudi Arabia have a long and tangled history. For many years, the two were sworn enemies. But since 2014, Saudi Arabia has co-opted Bashir to remove him from Iran’s sphere of influence. Money flowed in and Saudi lobbying helped remove United States sanctions on Sudan. Iranian cultural, medical and military facilities were closed and diplomats expelled.

In 2015, Sudanese troops joined the Saudi-led coalition fighting the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Similarly, the UAE wanted to ‘turn’ Bashir from his Islamist roots, and thus deprive its long-term enemy the Muslim Brotherhood of a safe haven in Khartoum.

All this changed earlier this year. As the street protests began to threaten Bashir’s grip on power, the Saudis and Emiratis started to look to a post-Bashir world.

Despite the Gulf monarchies’ known aversion to Arab uprisings, Saudi and UAE media were uncharacteristically upbeat in their coverage of Bashir’s overthrow – in many cases even appearing to support the protest movement.

This contrasted with Gulf rival Qatar’s Al Jazeera, which depicted the crisis as a conflict between military and civilian rule, and warned of a ‘coup’ against Bashir.

This didn’t help the Sudanese president, however. A past master at playing Gulf rivals off against each other, this time he had suddenly lost his touch.

After Bashir                                                                             

At the height of the protests he visited his long-time Qatari patron to ask for Doha’s money and backing. He returned empty-handed. For its part, the UAE reportedly refused to extend further support until he purged his administration of Islamists. Something he refused to do.

After the fall of Bashir, Saudi Arabia and the UAE announced a $3 billion aid package to meet Sudan’s most pressing needs. At about the same time, Sudanese media were gripped by the return of Major- General Taha Othman al-Hussein to Khartoum. Once Bashir’s chief of staff, he had fallen out with his former boss and turned up in Riyadh as a Saudi royal adviser.

He returned to Khartoum at the head of an Emirati delegation. It is widely believed that he was the architect of Sudan’s participation in the Yemen conflict, having overseen the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) as part of his earlier role at the presidency.

As well as playing a much-feared security enforcement role in Sudan, the RSF also provides the main component of the Sudanese forces fighting in the Saudi-led coalition against the Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

The Sudanese are posted at Yemen’s volatile border with Saudi, have fought in battles for control of Yemen’s west coast and provide security in cities in the coalition-controlled south.

The Yemeni rebels call them ‘mercenaries’ and ‘Janjaweed’ – the latter a reference to the RSF’s role in laying waste to Darfur in the early 2000s.

The Sudanese media don’t like them much either. They too refer to the forces as Janjaweed and accuse them of terrorizing civilians and carrying out ‘barbaric and brutal assaults’ against peaceful protesters.

Their leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who is also known as Hemeti, is loathed by the opposition. Facebook groups have branded him ‘a devil’ and the RSF the ‘Rapist Savage Forces’.

A former camel trader turned military leader, he was described by the influential pro-opposition website Dabanga as a man who has ‘never entered a military college, even for a single day, never trained or attended any military course, and never achieved any academic or any military awards’.

When Hemeti recently boasted about the large Sudanese contingent in the coalition in Yemen, another opposition website questioned why the lives of 30,000 Sudanese were being put at risk in a war in which Sudan has neither ‘a camel nor a mule at stake’. A column in the privately owned Sudanese newspaper Al-Jaridah said the Sudanese military ‘do not represent us and are not authorized to speak in our name when they say that Sudanese soldiers will remain in Yemen’.

Hemeti’s central role in the Transitional Military Council (TMC) and the violent dispersal of protests have not helped improve the military’s popularity. In April, videos circulated on social media depicted the Sudanese army ‘protecting’ the demonstrators outside military headquarters in Khartoum. Now the media make little reference to Sudan’s armed forces.

Saudi changes tack                                                              

As negotiations between the opposition and the military leaders stalled, the Saudis shifted tactics.

Their media prominently featured veteran Sudanese opposition figure Sadiq al-Mahdi, who was calling for compromise between the opposition and the military.

Saudi-owned, Dubai-based Al Arabiya TV tried to present itself as an objective observer. It gave equal air time to opposition and pro-TMC voices and regularly hosted representatives of the Sudanese Professionals Association, the group that had spearheaded the protests.

To their credit, Al Arabiya’s Sudanese reporters regularly reframe loaded questions by anchors and question TMC accusations against the protest movement in their live two-ways.

In July, the military and the opposition finally signed an agreement on a joint sovereign council that will rule during a transitional period.

Whether or not this compromise deal holds, Sudan’s future will continue to be heavily influenced by Gulf rivalries – backed by huge amounts of Gulf cash.

AUTHOR: Mohamed El Aassar is a Senior Journalist at BBC Monitoring’s Middle East and North Africa team

SOURCE: https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/twt/gulf-states-are-mapping-khartoum-s-future

Film: MEET THE JANJAWEED - Hemedti is positioning himself as paramilitary ruler of Darfur (Alex de Waal)

Note from Sudan Watch Editor:  Here is another great essay by Africa and Sudan expert Dr Alex de Waal.  It is a profile of Mohamed Hamdam Dagolo 'Hemedti' who is positioning himself as paramilitary ruler of Darfur. Yellow highlighting is mine for future reference.  At the end I have posted a link to a film entitled "MEET THE JANJAWEED" referred to by Alex in his essay as a 'television documentary'.  It is a must-see.

Article by Dr Alex de Waal

Dated 03 July 2019

General Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo ‘Hemedti’

General Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo “Hemedti” is the face of Sudan’s violent, political marketplace. 

Hemedti’s career is an object lesson in political entrepreneurship by a specialist in violence; his conduct and (as of now) impunity are the surest indicator that mercenarised politics that have long defined the Sudanese periphery, have been brought home to the capital city. Hemedti’s Rapid Support Force (RSF), a paramilitary led by Darfurian Arabs—and commonly decried as “Janjaweed”—are today the dominant power in Khartoum.

During the peaceful democracy protests in Khartoum, demonstrators chanted “we are all Darfur” as a rebuttal to regime propaganda, trying to portray them as rebels from the far periphery. During the crackdown of June 3, in which well over 100 protesters were killed, armed men wearing RSF uniforms chanted “You used to chant the whole country is Darfur. Now we brought Darfur to you, to Khartoum.”

“Hemedti” is the diminutive, endearing name for ‘little Mohamed’, which Mohamed Hamdan Dagolo has ironically kept because of his fresh-faced, youthful looks. For a moment, in the days after the April 11 overthrow of President Omar al Bashir, some of the young democracy protesters camped in the streets around the Ministry of Defense embraced him as the army’s new look.

Hemedti’s grandfather, Dagolo, was the head of a subclan of the Mahariya Rizeigat Arab tribe that roamed across the pastures of Chad and Darfur. 

Young men from the camel-herding Mahariya—landless and marginalised in both countries—became a core element of the Arab militia that fought in the vanguard of Khartoum’s counterinsurgency in Darfur. 

Hemedti is from the farthest of Sudan’s far peripheries, an outsider to the Khartoum political establishment.

Hemedti is a school dropout turned trader, without formal education or military staff college—the title ‘General’ was awarded on account of his proficiency in fighting and bargaining. He was a commander in the Janjaweed brigade in Southern Darfur at the height of the 2003-05 war, proving his mettle on the battlefield.

In 2007-08—the year of a widespread but inchoate rebellion by many of the Janjaweed against their patrons, Hemedti was a prominent mutineer. 

He led his forces into the bush, promising to fight Khartoum “until Judgment Day,” shot down an army helicopter, negotiated for an alliance with the Darfurian rebels, and threatened to storm the city of Nyala. 

Hemedti then cut a deal with the government, settling for a price that included payment of his troops’ unpaid salaries, compensation to the wounded and to the families of those killed, promotion to general, and a handsome cash payment. A television documentary captures his parallel negotiations with the Darfur rebels and his own government, his charm and concern for his troops—and the fact that he enlisted Arabs and non-Arabs alike in his ranks.

After returning to the Khartoum payroll, Hemedti proved his loyalty. Pres. al-Bashir became fond of him, sometimes appearing to treat him like the son he had never had. Al-Bashir reportedly called him “Hamayti”—my protector.

Hemedti has ably used his commercial acumen, military prowess—and the fact that the Sudanese establishment consistently underestimates him—to build his militia into a force more powerful than the waning Sudanese state.

On returning to the government fold, Hemedti’s troops constituted a brigade of the “Border Guards” headed by Musa Hilal, the leader of the Janjaweed. But he soon became a rival to his commander, and al-Bashir constituted his forces as a separate force in 2013, initially to fight the rebels of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army-North in the Nuba Mountains. The new Rapid Support Forces (RSF) came off second best. 

But, with a fleet of new pickup trucks with heavy machine guns, the RSF became a force to be reckoned with, fighting a key battle against Darfurian rebels in April 2015.

Following the March 2015 Saudi-Emirati military intervention in Yemen, the director of al-Bashir’s office, Taha Hussein, cut a deal with Riyadh to deploy Sudanese troops in Yemen. One of the commanders of the operation as Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan (current chair of the TMC). But most of the fighters were Hemedti’s RSF. This brought hard cash direct into Hemedti’s pocket.

And in November 2017, when his arch-rival Hilal rebelled and was captured, Hemedti’s forces took control of the artisanal gold mines in Jebel Amer in Darfur—Sudan’s single largest source of export revenues. Suddenly, Hemedti had his hands on the country’s two most lucrative sources of hard currency.

Hemedti is adopting a model of state mercenarism familiar to those who follow the politics of the Sahara. 

President Idriss Déby of Chad rents out his special forces for counter-insurgencies on the French or U.S. payroll in much the same manner. Hemedti has recently hired the services of the Canadian lobbying firm Dickens & Madson, which has previous contracts with Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe and Libyan militia commander Khalifa Haftar, with the explicit aim, among other things, of obtaining U.S. recognition and Russian funding. Expect to see RSF troops deployed to Libya any day soon.

Meanwhile, with the routine deployment of paramilitaries to do the actual fighting in Sudan’s wars at home and abroad, the Sudanese army has become akin to a vanity project: the proud owner of extravagant real estate in Khartoum, with impressive tanks, artillery and aircraft, but few battle-hardened infantry units. 

Other forces have stepped into this security arena, including the operational units of the National Intelligence and Security Services, and paramilitaries such as special police units—and the RSF. When the democracy demonstrators surrounded the Ministry of Defense on April 6, demanding that al-Bashir must go, Hemedti was one of the security cabal whom al-Bashir convened to decide how best to break this unarmed siege. Hemedti was caught on video arguing for the use of force, though he later claimed it was his brother speaking, not him. But on the morning of April 11, he joined the army generals in deposing al-Bashir, rather than massacring the protesters. For that he won a moment of celebrity.

Unnoticed by the eyes of the media, which are focused on Khartoum, the RSF has been taking over the camps of the UN-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) as that peacekeeping operation scales down. Hemedti is positioning himself as the de facto paramilitary ruler of Darfur. (That takeover was ordered to be halted after UN protests.) [ http://www.sudantribune.com/spip.php?article67678 ]

Since revolution day, unlike the army generals who have been cautious, even timid, and the leaders of the democracy protests, who have been painstakingly consultative, Hemedti has acted boldly and decisively. He saw that state power was lying in the streets of Khartoum to be seized by whoever had the audacity to take it. Hemedti took it: he realised that after decades of eviscerating political institutions, power in the capital functioned no differently to in lawless Darfur.

As negotiations between the generals and the democracy protesters dragged on, Hemedti repeatedly threatened to clear the streets by force—and several times, his soldiers opened fire, killing or wounding one or two.

Then, after al-Burhan and Hemedti visited Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Egypt, the TMC appears to have decided that it could impose military rule without facing anything more than empty protests from the international community. On June 3, Hemedti’s RSF brought his Janjaweed methods to Khartoum. His forces rampaged through the city, beginning with the camps of the protesters, burning the tents, often with people inside. More than 100 were killed. Many were raped. Many were chased through the streets, hunted down in their neighborhoods. They rampaged through the university campus. The RSF fighters terrorised Khartoum.

Hemedti denies this, and avers that an independent investigation will exonerate him. And indeed, most close observers think that it is possible that he intended a limited attack, and that elements from the ousted intelligence services of the former regime took the opportunity to escalate the violence, tarnish Hemedti’s reputation and divide him from the generals in the Transitional Military Council.

Whatever the true story, Hemedti is a specialist in violence and should have seen it coming; he can’t complain if his own methods are used against him.

On 29 June, the TMC accepted to negotiate on the basis of a power-sharing formula proposed by the Ethiopian mediation. But the same day, the RSF broke up a press conference by the AFC, and the following day—30 June, the African Union deadline for a handover of power to a civilian authority—broke up the democracy forces “millions march” with tear gas and live bullets, killing seven.

But there’s also a twist to the story. Every ruler in Sudan, with one notable exception, has hailed from the “Awlad al Balad”—the heartlands of Khartoum and the neighboring towns on the Nile. The exception is deputy and successor to the Mahdi, the Khalifa Abdullahi “al-Ta’aishi” who was a Darfurian Arab, whose armies provided the majority of the force that conquered Khartoum in 1885. The riverian elites remember the Khalifa’s rule (1885-98) as a tyranny. They are terrified it may return. Hemedti is the face of that nightmare, the first non-establishment ruler in Sudan for 120 years.

The other side of this coin is that Hemedti has opened negotiations with the armed rebels in Darfur and the Nuba Mountains, and he may have the clout and the credibility to cut a deal with them. Despite the grievances against Hemedti’s paramilitaries, the Darfur rebels still recognise that he is a Darfurian, and they have something in common with this outsider to the Sudanese establishment.

When the Sudanese regime sowed the wind of the Janjaweed in Darfur in 2003, they did not expect to reap the whirlwind in their own capital city. In fact the seeds had been sown much earlier, when previous governments adopted the war strategy in southern Sudan and southern Kordofan of setting local people against one another, rather than sending units of the regular army—manned by the sons of the riverain establishment—into peril. Hemedti is that whirlwind. Immediately, he is the boomerang of Janjaweedism that has returned to strike Khartoum. But his ascendancy is also, indirectly, the revenge of the historically marginalised. The slogan “we are all Darfur” must be more than an expression of solidarity with the victims of the Janjaweed, but also a far-reaching restructuring of Sudan to address the causes of the recurrent wars in the peripheries.

The tragedy of the Sudanese marginalised is that the man who is posing as their champion is the ruthless leader of a band of vagabonds, who has been supremely skillful in playing the transnational military marketplace.

“Hemedti” is employee of the month as the representative of that inhuman logic of paramilitary mercenary politics.

Note: The CRP blogs gives the views of the author, not the position of the Conflict Research Programme, the London School of Economics and Political Science, or the UK Government.

This blog post was originally published by the World Peace Foundation; our partners on the Conflict Research Programme.

About the author

Alex de Waal is the Research Programme Director for the Conflict Research Programme and Director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University.

VIDEO 

Title: Sudan: Meet the Janjaweed

7 years ago 7.3K views

sudanewsmedia

This report comes from Darfur, where the team secured unprecedented access to a key Arab armed group accused of being part of the infamous Janjaweed militia  

SUDAN WATCH UPDATE - Tue 13 Aug 2019 11:09:  This film report made at least seven years ago comes from Darfur where the UK TV Channel 4 News team secured unprecedented access to a key Arab armed group accused of being part of the infamous Janjaweed militia.

Title: Sudan: Meet the Janjaweed 

Producer: Channel 4, Unreported World, Andrew Carter, Nima Elbagir – reporter Nima Elbagir meets an Arab militia accused of being an important element of the Janjaweed, blamed for the atrocities in Darfur. Note, Nima Elbagir is a sister of Yousra Elbagir @YousraElbagir, another great journalist. An amazing pair.

Verified account@YousraElbagir

To visit the film click here: https://dai.ly/xtxd8n

SOURCE: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/crp/2019/07/03/general-mohamed-hamdan-dagolo-hemedti/

Further Reading

1,000 of Sudan RSF fighters deployed to warlord Haftar's Libya offensive

REPORTEDLY, four thousand members of Sudan’s notorious RSF militia are thought to be deployed to protect Haftar’s oil resources during the offensive on Libya's capital Tripoli.

Sudan Watch - Thursday, August 01, 2019

https://sudanwatch.blogspot.com/2019/08/1000-of-sudan-rsf-fighters-deployed-to.html

Sudan militia chief Hemeti hires Canadian lobbying group for $6m to influence US, Russia, Saudia Arabia, UN, AU, Libya in favour of TMC

Article from The Financial Times.com

Sudan Watch - Tuesday, July 02, 2019

https://sudanwatch.blogspot.com/2019/07/sudan-militia-chief-hemeti-hires.html

TMC VP RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Hemeti Dagolo: One of most powerful and richest in Sudan

• The money that Hemeti has acquired in recent years is all Sudanese national wealth: it has come to Hemeti primarily for his killing of civilians in Darfur, and more recently in Khartoum and El Obeid. And the killing will not end until Hemeti is brought under control and removed from any governance plans for the future of Sudan. 
• One key off-shore “money storage unit” is the large industrial conglomerate Al Junaid Industrial Group, based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and run by Hemeti’s brother Abdelrahman. 
• Other “investors” include some of the richest members of Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Services, largely responsible for the decades of torture and repression under the al-Bashir regime and continuing under the Transitional Military Council (TMC) junta.  Read full story here below.

Article written by Prof Eric Reeves

Dated 01 August 2019

“General” Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (“Hemeti”): One of the Most Powerful Men in Sudan—and One of the Richest

As the international community dithers, obfuscates, and contents itself with “grief” and “outrage” at the violence and massacres for which Hemeti’s Rapid Support Forces are conspicuously responsible, it must be pointed out that not only has Hemeti become the most powerful military figure in Sudan, but one of the richest. His vast wealth money comes from control of the Jebel Amir gold mines of North Darfur (which Hemeti took with inordinate amounts of bloodshed, particularly that of the Beni Hussein); his mercenary activities over the past six years in Darfur; the funds from the European Union’s disastrously conceived “Khartoum Process” to stanch the flow of African migration to Europe; and from the discretionary “political budget” that permits unrestricted and unrecorded diversion of national wealth to NISS, army, and RSF leaders—chiefly Hemeti.

Where has Hemeti’s wealth gone? How does he hide it? How does he ensure he will be wealthy whatever changes there are in Sudan?

One key off-shore “money storage unit” is the large industrial conglomerate Al Junaid Industrial Group, based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and run by Hemeti’s brother Abdelrahman. Other “investors” include some of the richest members of Sudan’s National Intelligence and Security Services, largely responsible for the decades of torture and repression under the al-Bashir regime and continuing under the Transitional Military Council junta.

The significance of Hemeti’s holdings in the Al Junaid Industrial Group is twofold: it shows just how close Hemeti is to the UAE leadership is, preeminently Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zayed; and it makes clear that if the international community wishes to pressure Hemeti, it should impose immediate sanctions on Hemeti and all his off-shore holdings. If the UAE resists such efforts, they themselves should be subject to sanctions, especially banking and travel sanctions.

We should recall that despite the public relations campaign by the UAE—which has attempted to make Dubai and Abu Dhabi destination resorts of the most luxurious sort, with promise of exotic and unrestricted tourist opportunities—the Emirates are, with Saudi Arabia, responsible for the unfathomably brutal and destructive war in Yemen against Houthi rebels. The war has created what is regularly (and I believe rightly) described as the greatest humanitarian crisis in the world, if one rendered largely invisible by Saudi denials of access.

Hemeti and General al-Burhan (chief of the Transitional Military Council) have been willing warriors in Yemen’s bloodbath, including in some of the deadliest fighting along the Yemeni coastline, through which humanitarian access is required. The Saudis have richly rewarded Sudan—but particularly Hemeti and al-Burhan—and unsurprisingly Hemeti’s RSF forces are now deploying to “intervene” in Libya’s ghastly civil war, joining the forces of General Khalifa Belqasim Haftar. Haftar’s forces are battling to unseat the UN-backed Government of National Accord (GNA) in Tripoli. His forces recently gained notoriety for the bombing attack on a migration detention center outside of Tripoli, a bombing that left “at least 44 dead and more than 130 severely injured, [the UN] describing the attack as ‘a war crime and odious bloody carnage [ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/03/air-strike-kill-libya-tripoli-migrant-detention-centre ] .’”

Whose Money Is It?

The money that Hemeti has acquired in recent years is all Sudanese national wealth: it has come to Hemeti primarily for his killing of civilians in Darfur, and more recently in Khartoum and El Obeid. And the killing will not end until Hemeti is brought under control and removed from any governance plans for the future of Sudan.

Moreover, that Hemeti has chosen to take this Sudanese wealth abroad—to the very actor that has done most to enable the Transitional Military Council, the UAE—is particularly outrageous. Sudan itself is desperate for such investment of national wealth, and such large diversion of that wealth by Hemeti, his brother, and NISS officials should make clear to all that they have no interest in Sudan and its collapsing economy, but only in their self-enrichment.

The international community, as well as the activist community, should target Al Junaid Industrial Group—and the UAE—in all ways possible ways. Products should be boycotted, bank transactions blocked, travel to the UAE should be limited in all possible ways.

I provide here the publicly available contact information for Al Junaid Industrial Group:

Al Junaid Industrial Group

Office #9, Industrial Area# 13, Sharjah, UAE

Landmark: Behind Tasheel

P.O. Box 61401, Sharjah

Tel: +971 6 5440233

Fax: +971 6 5440302

Email : info@aljunaidgroup.com

Facebook | https://www.facebook.com/pages/category/Company/Al-Junaid-Industrial-Group-314139131999489/

Instagram | https://www.instagram.com/aljunaidgroup/?hl=en

To view the original article click here: http://sudanreeves.org/2019/08/01/general-mohamed-hamdan-dagalo-hemeti-one-of-the-most-powerful-men-in-sudan-and-one-of-the-richest/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Eric Reeves has been writing about greater Sudan for the past twenty years. His work is here organized chronologically, and includes all electronic and other publications since the signing of the historic Machakos Protocol (July 2002), which guaranteed South Sudan the right to a self- determination referendum. There are links to a number of Reeves’ formal publications in newspapers, news magazines, academic journals, and human rights publications, as well as to the texts of his Congressional testimony and a complete list of publications, testimony, and academic presentations. LEARN MORE

UAE's transport hub for mercenaries in Libya, Yemen - UAE requested multiple stopovers across Sudan

Article from The New Arab

Date: Friday, 26 July, 2019

Sudan 'UAE's transport hub' for mercenaries in Libya, Yemen: report

Photo: The UAE requested multiple stopovers for 'passengers and cargo' across Sudan [Getty]

The UAE has used Sudanese airspace and ports for the transportation of hundreds of mercenaries fighting in conflicts in Libya and Yemen via Eritrea, according to leaked official documents published by Al Jazeera's Arabic-language site.

The report further confirmed the widespread use of mercenary fighters by the Gulf country in its various conflicts across the region.

The news coincides with reports that 1,000 Sudanese mercenaries arrived in Libya on Thursday [25 July], charged with protecting oil facilities under General Khalifa Haftar's control, in order for the Libyan warlord to focus his troops' efforts on the battle to take Tripoli.

The UAE, along with Egypt, support General Haftar and have supplied his militia alliance - known as the Libyan National Army (LNA) - with military aid including anti-aircraft missiles, ammunition and night sighting devices.

One of the documents, a letter from the Emirati embassy in Khartoum to the Sudanese foreign ministry, reveals Abu Dhabi requested a diplomatic permit for two military transport planes to cross the country and land at El Geneina airport in Darfur, western Sudan.

The same letter stated that the planes were carrying "passengers from the Sudanese forces" and requested to carry out the stop between the 1 and 30 June.

The letter also revealed the planes were flying from and departing to Assab in Eritrea, where an Emirati base used for operations in Yemen's Hodeidah is situated.

In another letter, the embassy requested diplomatic permits for two military planes to land at Khartoum airport to transport "passengers and cargo" from the Sudanese capital to Kharouba airport, also known as Khadim airport, on LNA-controlled territory in Libya, also used as an Emirati military base. 

The route also included Abu Dhabi and Cairo airports, and requested the stopovers between 25 and 26 May.

Al Jazeera also alleges that Hemedti, the commander of Sudan's Rapid Support Forces Militia, has recruited some 450 mercenaries from Arab tribes in Darfur, Chad and Niger, requesting they are "light-skinned" and "speak Arabic", citing confidential sources.

Upon UN-backed government forces retaking the Libyan town of Gharyan from Haftar's LNA, videos purported to show captured mercenaries from Chad having been recruited by the Emirati-backed warlord.

View the original article here: https://www.alaraby.co.uk/english/news/2019/7/26/sudan-uaes-transport-hub-for-mercenaries-in-libya-yemen

- - -

وثائق ومصادر خاصة للجزيرة نت.. طائرات عسكرية إماراتية تستخدم مطارات السودان وحميدتي يجند مرتزقة لأبو ظبي https://t.co/rBQOE6eHIU

— zahran shakkah (@zahranshakkah) 24 July 2019

To visit the above tweet click here: https://twitter.com/zahranshakkah/status/1154063080810266624

and the source Al Jazeera here: https://www.aljazeera.net/news/politics/2019/7/24/السودان-الإمارات-استخدام-أجواء-السودان-مهام-عسكرية-حميدتي

Sudan: Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal, master of Mohamed Hamdam “Hemeti” Dagolo during their brutal campaign in Darfur should be tried by ICC

Note from Sudan Watch Editor: When I started reading the below copied news report published at BBC News online on 20 July, I marvelled at its author. The report is so well written and researched I thought the BBC had hired an incredible new journalist. At the end of the report I saw the author’s name: Alex de Waal. I should have guessed, nobody can write about Sudan like Alex can. The report is a must-read. 

Note, beneath Alex's report I have copied and pasted a copy of a BBC news report dated 2017 showing that Musa Hilal and his son were arrested. I am surprised not more has been made of that piece of news. Where is Mr Hilal and his son now, I wonder. The report suggests he was taken to Khartoum. Is he hidden behind the scenes or in the same prison as ex-President Omar Al-Bashir? Musa Hilal was elected into the Sudanese government. Click on the tags for Musa Hilal at this blog, or type in his name in the search box here at Sudan Watch to read reports from the archive. Musa Hilal, along with Hemeti, ought to be put on trial at the International Criminal Court (ICC) to answer for their war crimes and crimes against humanity. In my view, they are so ruthless and lacking in fear, remorse and compassion, I believe they are psychopaths who have gotten away with many terrible murders.

Note the following excerpt from Rebecca Hamilton's 3 Dec 2009 article entitled The Monster of Darfur:

"As Hilal explains it, Arabs were forced to flee their villages long before any “zurga” (literally “black,” a derogatory term for non-Arabs). But, he added scathingly, “[W]e would never go to a [displaced persons] camp and be seen as beggars." To solve the crisis in Darfur, Arabs have to be in charge, he continued. "We have the majority in the field. We have the majority of the livestock. There can be no solution without us”. He sat back in his chair and lit a cigarette. “I am not the leader of the Janjaweed. I am the leader of all the Arab tribes in Darfur,” Hilal said, his relaxed confidence returning." [Read more here: https://newrepublic.com/article/71627/the-monster-darfur]

BBC News report

By Alex de Waal

Published 20 July 2019

Sudan crisis: The ruthless mercenaries who run the country for gold

Photo: The Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been accused of widespread abuses in Sudan, including the 3 June massacre in which more than 120 people were reportedly killed, with many of the dead dumped in the River Nile Sudan expert Alex de Wall charts their rise. (Photo credit AFP)

The RSF are now the real ruling power in Sudan. They are a new kind of regime: a hybrid of ethnic militia and business enterprise, a transnational mercenary force that has captured a state.

Their commander is General Mohamed Hamdan "Hemeti" Dagolo, and he and his fighters have come a long way since their early days as a rag-tag Arab militia widely denigrated as the "Janjaweed".

The RSF was formally established by decree of then-President Omar al-Bashir in 2013. But their core of 5,000 militiamen had been armed and active long before then.

Their story begins in 2003, when Mr Bashir's government mobilised Arab herders to fight against black African insurgents in Darfur.

'Meet the Janjaweed'

The core of the Janjaweed were camel-herding nomads from the Mahamid and Mahariya branches of the Rizeigat ethnic group of northern Darfur and adjoining areas of Chad - they ranged across the desert edge long before the border was drawn.

During the 2003-2005 Darfur war and massacres, the most infamous Janjaweed leader was Musa Hilal, chief of the Mahamid.

Human rights groups accuse Musa Hilal of leading a brutal campaign in Darfur  Image copyright AFP

As these fighters proved their bloody efficacy, Mr Bashir formalised them into a paramilitary force called the Border Intelligence Units.

One brigade, active in southern Darfur, included a particularly dynamic young fighter, Mohamed Dagolo, known as "Hemeti" because of his baby-faced looks - Hemeti being a mother's endearing term for "Little Mohamed".

A school dropout turned small-time trader, he was a member of the Mahariya clan of the Rizeigat. Some say that his grandfather was a junior chief when they resided in Chad.

A crucial interlude in Hemeti's career occurred in 2007, when his troops became discontented over the government's failure to pay them.

They felt they had been exploited - sent to the frontline, blamed for atrocities, and then abandoned.

Hemeti and his fighters mutinied, promising to fight Khartoum "until judgement day", and tried to cut a deal with the Darfur rebels.

A documentary shot during this time, called Meet the Janjaweed, shows him recruiting volunteers from Darfur's black African Fur ethnic group into his army, to fight alongside his Arabs, their former enemies.

Although Hemeti's commanders are all from his own Mahariya clan, he has been ready to enlist men of all ethnic groups. On one recent occasion the RSF absorbed a breakaway faction of the rebel Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) - led by Mohamedein Ismail "Orgajor", an ethnic Zaghawa - another Darfur community which had been linked to the rebels.

Consolidating power

Hemeti went back to Khartoum when he was offered a sweet deal: back pay for his troops, ranks for his officers (he became a brigadier general - to the chagrin of army officers who had gone to staff college and climbed the ranks), and a handsome cash payment.

His troops were put under the command of the National Intelligence and Security Service (NISS), at that time organising a proxy war with Chad.

Some of Hemeti's fighters, serving under the banner of the Chadian opposition, fought their way as far as the Chadian capital, N'Djamena, in 2008.

Meanwhile, Hemeti fell out with his former master, Hilal - their feud was to be a feature of Darfur for 10 years. Hilal was a serial mutineer, and Mr Bashir's generals found Hemeti more dependable.

In 2013, a new paramilitary force was formed under Hemeti and called the RSF.

The army chief of staff did not like it - he wanted the money to go to strengthening the regular forces - and Mr Bashir was worried about putting too much power in the hands of NISS, having just fired its director for allegedly conspiring against him.

So the RSF was made answerable to Mr Bashir himself - the president gave Hemeti the nickname "Himayti", meaning "My Protector".

Training camps were set up near the capital, Khartoum. Hundreds of Land Cruiser pick-up trucks were imported and fitted out with machine guns.

RSF troops fought against rebels in South Kordofan - they were undisciplined and did not do well - and against rebels in Darfur, where they did better.

Gold rush

Hemeti'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.

Sudan is one of Africa’s biggest gold producers

But it was more of a curse. Tens of thousands of young men flocked to a remote corner of Darfur in a latter-day gold rush to try their luck in shallow mines with rudimentary equipment.

Some struck gold and became rich, others were crushed in collapsing shafts or poisoned by the mercury and arsenic used to process the nuggets

Hilal's militiamen forcibly took over the area, killing more than 800 people from the local Beni Hussein ethnic group, and began to get rich by mining and selling the gold.

Some gold was sold to the government, which paid above the market price in Sudanese money because it was so desperate to get its hands on gold that it could sell on in Dubai for hard currency.

Meanwhile some gold was smuggled across the border to Chad, where it was profitably exchanged in a racket involving buying stolen vehicles and smuggling them back into Sudan.

Hemeti has loyal supporters outside the capital

In the desert markets of Tibesti in northern Chad, a 1.5kg (3.3lb) of unwrought gold was bartered for a 2015 model Land Cruiser, probably stolen from an aid agency in Darfur, which was then driven back to Darfur, fitted out with hand-painted licence plates and resold.

By 2017, gold sales accounted for 40% of Sudan's exports. And Hemeti 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, Hemeti's RSF went on the counter-attack.

In November 2017, his forces arrested Hilal [ https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-42141938 ], and the RSF took over Sudan's most lucrative gold mines.

Regional muscle

Hemeti overnight became the country's biggest gold trader and - by controlling the border with Chad and Libya - its biggest border guard. Hilal remains in prison.

Under the Khartoum Process, the European Union funded the Sudanese government to control migration across the Sahara to Libya.

Although the EU consistently denies it, many Sudanese believe that this gave license to the RSF to police the border, extracting bribes, levies and ransoms - and doing its share of trafficking too.

RSF fighters have fought for Yemen’s government in the civil war which is devastating the country

Dubai is the destination for almost all of Sudan's gold, official or smuggled. But Hemeti's contacts with the UAE soon became more than just commercial.

In 2015, the Sudanese government agreed to send a battalion of regular forces to serve with the Saudi-Emirati coalition forces in Yemen - its commander was Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, now chair of the ruling Transitional Military Council.

But a few months later, the UAE struck a parallel deal with Hemeti to send a much larger force of RSF fighters, for combat in south Yemen and along the Tahama plain - which includes the port city of Hudaydah, the scene of fierce fighting last year.

Hemeti also provided units to help guard the Saudi Arabian border with Yemen.

By this time, the RSF's strength had grown tenfold. Its command structure didn't change: all are Darfurian Arabs, its generals sharing the Dagolo 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.

Cash handouts and PR polish

Through gold and officially sanctioned mercenary activity, Hemeti 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.

Since April, Hemeti has moved fast, politically and commercially

By the time Mr Bashir was ousted in April, Hemeti 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.

Hemeti has moved fast, politically and commercially.

Every week he is seen in the news, handing cash to the police to get them back on the streets, to electric workers to restore services, or to teachers to have them return to the classrooms. He handed out cars to tribal chiefs.

As the UN-African Union peacekeeping force drew down in Darfur, the RSF took over their camps - until the UN put a halt to the withdrawal.

Hemeti says he has increased his RSF contingent in Yemen and has despatched a brigade to Libya to fight alongside the rogue general Khalifa Haftar, presumably on the UAE payroll, but also thereby currying favour with Egypt which also backs Gen Haftar's self-styled Libyan National Army.

Hemeti has also signed a deal with a Canadian public relations firm to polish his image and gain him political access in Russia and the US.

Hemeti and the RSF are in some ways familiar figures from the history of the Nile Valley. In the 19th Century, mercenary freebooters ranged across what are now Sudan, South Sudan, Chad, and the Central African Republic, publicly swearing allegiance to the Khedive of Egypt but also setting up and ruling their own private empires.

Yet in other ways Hemeti 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.

Alex de Waal is the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

View the original report plus a video here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-48987901

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BBC News report

Published 27 November 2017

Sudan says militia leader Musa Hilal arrested

Sudanese authorities have arrested a powerful militia leader suspected of human rights abuses in the Darfur region

Musa Hilal was detained after fighting with Sudanese forces near his hometown in North Darfur, state media reports.

He is a former ally of Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir and led the government-allied Janjaweed militia.

Musa Hilal is subject to UN sanctions for his suspected involvement in the Darfur conflict of the mid-2000s.

His son Habeeb was also detained in the clashes in North Darfur, Sudan's defence minister, Lt Gen Ali Mohamed Salem, said.

"They were arrested after clashes in the area but the security situation there is now stable. They will soon be brought to Khartoum," Gen Salem added.

Musa Hilal was appointed as an adviser to President Bashir in 2008 but they later fell out. His fighters have often clashed with Sudanese forces in Darfur.

The latest fighting started on Sunday when Sudanese troops were ambushed as they oversaw a handover of weapons under a disarmament campaign, the Sudan Tribune reported.

Sudan's Rapid Support Forces said they lost 10 members, including a commander.

Musa Hilal has refused to surrender the weapons held by his militia and has also declined mediation to resolve the dispute, the report adds.

The Darfur conflict erupted in 2003 when black African rebels began attacking government targets, accusing Khartoum of favouring Arabs.

In response, the mainly Arab Janjaweed militia was accused of carrying out a policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide against Darfur's black African population.

Arrest warrants against President Bashir were issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in 2009 and 2010 on charges of genocide, war crimes, and crimes against humanity in Darfur. The conflict claimed at least 300,000 lives.

He denies the charge and has evaded arrest.

View the original report here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-42141938