Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman was a leader of the violence in Darfur that killed more than 300,000 people and left 2.7 million homeless.Piroschka Van De Wouw/Reuters
A former commander of Sudan’s notorious Janjaweed militia has been found guilty of 27 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity in the first international conviction of a suspect in the Darfur massacres that the court’s prosecutors have called a genocide.
The International Criminal Court in The Hague has convicted Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-al-Rahman, known as Ali Kushayb, of charges that include murder, rape, torture, pillaging, ethnic persecution and outrages on personal dignity during the militia’s torching and destruction of villages across Darfur in 2003 and 2004.
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He was a leader of the Janjaweed’s scorched-earth campaign that killed more than 300,000 people and left 2.7 million homeless during a prolonged government offensive against perceived rebels in the Darfur region of western Sudan.
In its unanimous verdict on Monday, a three-judge chamber of the ICC said Mr. Abd-al-Rahman personally led brutal assaults on Darfur villages, exhorting the largely Arab militia fighters to “wipe out and sweep away” the largely non-Arab villagers and to “leave no one alive.” The Janjaweed, who called him “Commander Ali,” understood his instructions to mean “to kill without any limit,” the court said.
“He encouraged and gave instructions that resulted in the killings, rapes and destruction,” it said.
An elderly woman with other displaced people in the town of Niyama, Darfur in June, 2004.Evelyn Hockstein
Mr. Abd-al-Rahman supervised the loading of dozens of prisoners onto trucks and ordered their execution, after telling the militia to “prepare their graves,” the court found. He hurled insults at the detainees, called them “slaves” and assaulted two of them with an axe, causing their death from head injuries, the court said.
“I’m not going to even spend one single shot on you because shots are expensive,” he told one of the detainees, according to witnesses. “So all I’m going to use is this axe.”
The bespectacled 76-year-old defendant, wearing a three-piece suit and a maroon tie, showed no emotion as the presiding judge Joanna Korner read the verdict to him in the courtroom. He will be sentenced at a later date.
The verdict was based on testimony from 81 witnesses and more than 1,500 pieces of evidence, including documents and satellite photos. A deputy prosecutor at the court, Nazhat Shameem Khan, said the conviction is “a crucial step toward closing the impunity gap” in Darfur.
“It sends a resounding message to perpetrators of atrocities in Sudan, both past and present, that justice will prevail, and that they will be held accountable for inflicting unspeakable suffering on Darfuri civilians,” she said, describing the case as just “the first of a number” in Darfur that the court is working on.
In the latest Sudan war that began in 2023, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces – the militia formerly known as the Janjaweed - have orchestrated a genocide against civilians in Darfur, according to human-rights groups and the U.S. government.
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The ICC’s prosecutors announced last year that they were urgently accelerating their probe of fresh atrocities in Darfur and have gathered evidence of massacres.
Liz Evenson, international justice director at Human Rights Watch, said the verdict on Monday was a “landmark conviction” and the “first opportunity for victims terrorized by the Janjaweed to see a measure of justice before the court.”
The Montreal-based Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights said the verdict should spur governments around the world to protect Sudan’s civilians by halting the flow of weapons and protecting aid corridors. It said Darfur is now suffering “a second genocide,” fuelled by the same ethnic hatred against the same groups.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Türk said the verdict was “an important acknowledgment of the enormous suffering” endured by Mr. Abd-al-Rahman’s victims. He said the victims had courageously shared their accounts of “harrowing and life-altering loss” in an attempt to bring justice to their “seemingly untouchable tormentors.”
The ICC issued its first arrest warrant for Mr. Abd-al-Rahman in 2007, but he evaded justice for 13 years. He finally surrendered in 2020 in Central African Republic, where he had been hiding.
Three other former Sudanese officials are still wanted on war-crimes charges in The Hague. Among them is Sudan’s former president Omar al-Bashir, who has been charged with genocide and other crimes. He is in custody in Sudan on separate domestic charges, but authorities have refused to send him to The Hague.
In its verdict on Monday, the court documented how the Janjaweed had been armed and trained by Sudan’s government, and how the militia had followed orders from senior Sudan officials – a finding that could make it easier to convict former government officials if they are arrested and brought to trial in The Hague.