Dena Ibrahim spent the evening of April 14, 2023, at a concert in Khartoum, listening to traditional Sudanese instruments and enjoying an evening during Ramadan. The next morning there were fighter jets in the sky. A brittle power-sharing agreement between the Sudanese Army and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that had participated in a violent crackdown on pro-democracy protests in 2019, had fallen apart, and the two had turned on each other. In the almost 14 months of conflict that have followed, it has become clear that the R.S.F. is at war with more than just the army. "They are massacring, torturing, raping and mutilating members of non-Arab ethnic groups — the same victims as before — while burning or bulldozing their villages, survivors say," Nicholas Kristof wrote in a column that noted the parallels with the genocide in Darfur, a region in west Sudan, in the 2000s. In an essay published this week, Ibrahim recounts another front in the R.S.F.'s destruction: Sudan's art, culture and heritage. The militia has looted homes of their contents and museums of their ancient artifacts. It has trampled on ancient ruins and allegedly ransacked or burned libraries and archives. In September, Ibrahim heard that it had destroyed the instruments that she'd listened to on the eve of the war. Ibrahim has grappled for some time with the question of why. In a video call, she talked about being wary of attaching too much meaning or a coherent ideology to everything the fighters do. She suspected some of it was destruction for the sheer joy of it — that for some of the members of the militia, war is a living and loot is the reward. Whatever the motive, for the victims the outcome is the same: What existed before the war does not exist anymore. "I fled my home in Sudan one year ago," Ibrahim writes. "Millions of people are still there, trapped between an incompetent army and the genocidal militia it created. For them, it has been a year of summary executions, encroaching famine and city after city ravaged by the militia." "There was no place for rogue militias in the Sudan we dreamed of at the sit-in in 2019," she adds. "They stole that future from us, and now they are erasing our past." Here's what we're focusing on today:
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Thursday, June 6, 2024
Opinion Today: A nation’s stolen past, and future
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