Human Rights Watch marks the anniversary by counting the sanctions that were never imposed
The atrocity record of the RSF’s capture of El Fasher is largely established. HRW’s new line is an absence: who has still not been designated a year later.
Laetitia Bader’s piece for Human Rights Watch, published Monday 26 October and written up by JURIST the following day, is a consolidation rather than new field reporting. It recounts the 18-month siege, the trench the RSF dug around the city in its final months, residents reduced to eating animal fodder until that ran out, and drones used against soldiers, aligned armed groups and civilians confined to a shrinking perimeter. The UN Human Rights Office estimate of more than 6,000 people killed in three days during the final offensive is restated. So is the UN fact-finding mission’s conclusion that the campaign bore the “hallmarks of genocide.” HRW describes widespread sexual violence and a mass abduction-for-ransom operation in which those who could not pay were killed, and says thousands of civilians may still be held. One returning resident is quoted: “It is as if a tsunami had hit the city.”
The newer material is the external-patron line and the accountability ledger that follows from it. HRW says Colombian private military contractors, trained at UAE military bases, were deployed alongside the RSF on the front lines operating drones and artillery, and that survivors' accounts place them present during some of the worst atrocities. It then lists what has not happened in the year since: Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo has not been sanctioned beyond earlier designations by the Biden administration; Global Security Services Group, the UAE-based company HRW says apparently hired the Colombian fighters, has not been sanctioned; and the UAE has not been held to account for military support that HRW says violates the UN arms embargo on Darfur. At the Security Council, HRW notes, the United States is pushing to extend that embargo countrywide.
Assessment: Read this as advocacy, because it is, and the atrocity recap is a year old. The usable part is the ledger, because an absence of designations is checkable against the OFAC, UK and EU lists in an afternoon, and because it reframes the question from what the RSF did to what its patrons have cost. The weak link is the embargo push: HRW and The National both place it at the Security Council, but no tabled text, no draft and no vote date have surfaced. A stated intention is not a resolution. Until one appears, the gap HRW is counting is the policy, not a failure of it.