Where the Human Rights Abuses Are: Daily Brief

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August 4, 2023
By Andrew Stroehlein
Contact me at DailyBriefTeam@hrw.org and Twitter @astroehlein.

In today's Daily Brief:

To Understand Abuses, Understand Power
Darfur Dispatch: Ambush at Sunrise
Take Note: Other Key Stories
Weekly Quiz Bonus!
While We’re Away: Archive in Three Languages

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Where the Human Rights Abuses Are

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This will be our last regular Daily Brief until September 4, when we are all back again, so I wanted to leave readers with a slightly longer, more reflective top story today…

When asked why he robbed banks, the so-called “gentleman bank robber,” Willie Sutton, replied: “Because that’s where the money is.”

I sometimes get asked why I’m so often writing here about vulnerable people, and why human rights defenders generally are constantly focused on minorities.

Although I’m not keen to compare myself to a bank robber, not even a “gentleman” one, I have to answer in a similar “well, duh” sort of way: because that’s where the human rights abuses are.

It’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? Powerful people – those with access to money and lawyers and political contacts – are not as likely to be subject to human right abuses. It’s not impossible, but it’s rare, and when it happens, the powerful can defend themselves. By definition.

And I’m not just talking about billionaires here. Even those with more limited means can get satisfaction through legal routes – at least if they live in a country where there are enforceable laws, if the government respects those laws, and the courts basically work. Some big “ifs,” I know, but at least they have a chance.

However, it’s the truly powerless folks who are so often the target of abuses – often by the powerful – precisely because they can’t defend themselves.

Look at one of the most persistently abused groups around the world today: refugees and migrants. These are people who may have lost everything in a war back home: their job, their home, their family. Or maybe they’re escaping extreme poverty.

They set off with little or nothing, searching for sanctuary or a better life, and where they’re living now – or trying to live – they have little power. They can’t vote, and very often, they can’t work legally either. This political and economic powerlessness makes them vulnerable.

Unscrupulous politicians are all too quick to jump on that vulnerability. They tell voters their problems are the fault of those newcomers. And with no refugee votes or campaign donations to worry about, politicians can in some sense target the newcomers “cost free.”

It’s the laziest form of politics, of course: blaming someone else rather taking responsibility and addressing difficult social and economic issues. Bashing the vulnerable is simple; solving problems is hard. But this lazy politics too often works for the politician in terms of media attention and votes.

The same dynamic can happen when it comes to minorities, too, whether ethnic, racial, or sexual minorities. Politicians from majority communities use them as scapegoats to boost their careers in the same way.

And the smaller – and less powerful – the minority, the better for politicians’ purposes. Just take what’s been happening to trans folks, for example.

If a person has a clear head, unbefuddled by the whipped-up fears of shouty TV talking heads, there is no possible way they could objectively say this tiny group of people represents any threat to anyone. And yet, politicians from the US to Hungary to Russia are spending huge amounts of time and effort to bash them in speeches and abuse them with new laws.

Even when it comes to larger minority communities, very often – for reasons of long-term discrimination and unequal opportunities historically – they can find it difficult to fight back. They can be shut out of costly legal pathways to defend their rights, or at least face greater obstacles doing so.

In any case, the message from politicians to the wider public is similar: those people over there, they are the problem. Politicians with power then punish those with less or no power, as if to say: “See, I am doing something about this huge problem I’ve told you you have.” (And please, dear voters, don’t look at anything else, like my corruption or my failure to solve your real problems.)

Sadly, media often play along – in more repressive places because that’s what authorities direct them to do, and in less repressive places because fear and hate are good for business models based on clicks and views. So, too many members of the public accept the sacrifice of the vulnerable – a kind of political sadism – as normal.

It becomes so commonplace, people can even get to the point where they fail to recognize the glaring immorality of things like the EU’s “let them die” policy in the Mediterranean Sea or Texas officials in the US pushing kids into razor wire and deadly river currents.

It’s our role as human rights defenders to remind everyone that this isn’t normal. That it’s completely unacceptable to anyone with any sense at all of human dignity. That politicians are lying to you. And that these vulnerable people they are abusing to boost their political careers are just that: people – with fundamental rights like everyone else.

So, yeah, we work with the vulnerable and minorities a lot, because that’s where the human rights abuses are.

A Sudanese woman, who fled the conflict in Murnei in Sudan's Darfur region, walks beside carts carrying her family belongings upon crossing the border between Sudan and Chad in Adre, Chad, August 2, 2023. © 2023 REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra

Darfur Dispatch: Ambush at Sunrise

On Monday, in a special edition of this newsletter, we highlighted ongoing mass atrocity crimes in Darfur, Sudan, and promised updates from our researchers interviewing survivors in neighboring Chad.

On Tuesday, we presented a shocking account of a 16-year-old girl who barely escaped the slaughter in El Geneina, the regional capital of West Darfur. The day after, we published an eye-witness testimony of an attack on a medical clinic. Yesterday, we continued with a survivor’s description of foreign fighters working with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and their allied militias to carry out atrocities.

Today, my colleagues, Belkis Wille and Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, have sent the following testimony from our final witness in this week’s series.

The 43-year-old man was in a hospital in Adre, eastern Chad, getting treatment for gunshot wounds he received while trying to flee fighting in El Geneina, as part of a mass exodus of civilians, many ethnic Massalit, from the town. He was one of many there with similar injuries.

There was very heavy bombing in that area affecting women and children, and many people were injured and died because of this.

So, people decided to evacuate to a safer area, to Ardamata [near a military base, northeast of El Geneina].

We started our journey from El Madares area [a neighbourhood of El Geneina]. We started fleeing at night until we reached Al Naseem bridge. By then, it was already sunrise, and there was a big crowd with people on foot, on donkey carts, and in vehicles. Movement was very difficult because of the crowd.

As the sun rose, we discovered that we were being ambushed from all directions.

They shot me, and I got injured there. The bullet that shot me actually killed someone else, hitting them in the head. Many people were killed.

The witness was then taken by the assailants and dumped in a location with other injured and dead men.

[They] collected the injured and the dead bodies under a tree, near a dirty pool of water.

At this pool, they beat people with sticks, and they also forced us to drink the water. They forced us to keep our heads inside the water, and if we removed our heads from the water, we would be beaten.

And from there, they thought that all of us were already dead.

[The assailants] were from Arab tribes. They had sniper guns, machine guns, AKs, different types of weapons. They were in civilian clothes, but in fact of all of them were with the RSF.

They asked you for your tribe first. If you say you are Massalit, you will be tortured more than the others. They will tell you, “This is your land? This is your land?”

They will ask you for your tribe. That’s the question they were asking everybody. So, some people would lie and say they are [ethnic] Bargu or Fur, but all of them were also killed.

The man’s ordeal didn’t end there.

We [were initially] 10 in that water, but they started to collect people from other streets and bring them with us. And they [the attackers] said, “collect these dead bodies or they will contaminate the area.” I cannot tell the number of dead bodies. Many, many were killed.

The attackers then dumped the witness with other bodies in a vehicle and drove them away to the side of Leria mountain, on the northern outskirts of El Geneina.

I was in the [the back of the pickup] vehicle when they dropped dead bodies on top (of me).

They carried the dead bodies, when they threw us on that mountain, they said “make sure all of them died” so they opened fire on us again. And I was injured in my left leg (shows scar in upper left thigh)

But fortunately, I was not severely injured by that bullet.

He said that there were 20 of them, all men, with the youngest around 25 or 30 years old. Only two among them survived.

I became unconscious, and I woke up the next day. There was an [older man] next to me and that he was also alive. He had been severely beaten… and shot in the hand.

I said to him, “Are you ok?” “I am ok,” he said. “Can you walk?” “Yes, I can,” he said.’ I asked him, “Where is Ardamata from here?”

He showed me the direction of Ardamata, and we started walking together. We left at 8 a.m., and at 6 p.m. we reached Ardamata.

Two people stopped us. One of them was armed, and the other was not. The armed man was holding an AK-47. He said, “Stop here, stop here,” and he asked me which tribe I am from. I said Massalit, and he said, “Since the time of the Prophet, people were not able to control the Arabs. Who are you to control the Arabs?”

I told him, ‘Kill me,” and he said, “I will not kill someone like you” because at the time my body was covered in blood.

The two men were able to continue their journey, and eventually made it to Adre in eastern Chad.

The warring parties, and notably Rapid Support Forces and their allied militias, should allow people to move safely. Access to safe medical care inside Sudan and in neighboring countries should be guaranteed.