Sudan paramilitary leader Hemeti closes in on power Feared former rebel rises from killing fields of Darfur to Khartoum’s inner circle
By Tom Wilson in Khartoum JUNE 21 2019
He was a camel trader with little formal education when he first took up arms, but in little more than a decade Lieutenant General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo has risen from the remote killing fields of Darfur to the top of the administration in Khartoum.
Better known as Hemeti, he was appointed the deputy head of the ruling transitional military council in April after the army ousted former strongman president Omar al-Bashir.
But while formally he defers to the head of the council, Lt Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, it is the younger, more outspoken Lt Gen Hamdan who has come to the fore as the military has tightened its grip on Sudan’s faltering transition. By most accounts, he is already the country’s de facto leader.
Since our independence in 1956 no one from Darfur has ever become as powerful as Hemeti is now
Rudwan Daoud, a Darfuri politician
Lt Gen Hamdan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a paramilitary unit formed from the remnants of Darfur’s feared Janjaweed horseback militias, have control of the most strategic parts of the capital. He appears regularly on state television, has met with foreign envoys and has travelled to Saudi Arabia to visit the Sudanese military council’s most important backers.
Now there are fears that the former rebel’s pursuit of power could provoke a backlash from other parts of the armed forces for whom Lt Gen Hamdan is an upstart from a faraway region.
“Since the creation of the Janjaweed militias in 2003 a share of the army has felt disrespected and disgruntled,” said Jérôme Tubiana, an expert on Sudan’s military and rebel groups. “Tensions are already there and the risk of a split is certain.”
In the days following the coup, Lt Gen Hamdan claimed that he had rebuffed the final demands of a desperate Mr Bashir to use RSF troops to disperse thousands of protesters. This won him temporary respect from parts of the pro-democracy movement.
That evaporated when he turned his soldiers on the people earlier this month, shooting, killing and raping protesters, according to victims and groups of medical professionals who treated the wounded. In less than 12 hours more than 100 people died and hopes for a peaceful transition to civilian rule faded.
As the world called for an independent investigation, Lt Gen Hamdan, 45, sought to deflect criticism. At a rally on Saturday, north of Khartoum, he claimed western leaders were seeking to undermine him. Lt Gen Hamdan did not respond when the Financial Times sought comment, and requests for a meeting made through the Ministry of Information went unanswered.
In an interview, the head of the air force, Lt Gen Salah Abdel Khalig — one of the officers on the seven-man military council — denied that Lt Gen Hamdan was all-powerful or seeking higher office.
“It is General Hemeti who gives the orders to [the RSF] but he cannot take the decision by himself,” he told the FT last week at the presidential palace. “They are part of us . . . they are part of the armed forces.”
But even as he spoke, the air force head’s words betrayed anxiety over the younger man’s ambition. Lt Gen Hamdan was only perceived to be in charge “because he is talking too much in the media and because his troops are very visible to the population on the street,” he said. “As a military commander, he does it very well, but as a political commander he cannot do it.”
Besides, Lt Gen Khalig said, the RSF’s trucks mounted with high-calibre machine guns would be no match for the military. “Other forces are stronger than him, we have infantry, we have artillery, we have air force, a lot of aircraft. He is not the strong man here in Khartoum, maybe in Darfur,” he said.
So far, the RSF and the army have presented a united front. But a violent split between the two would be catastrophic, a western diplomat said. Though the army has more troops, the RSF’s fighters are battle-hardened and better equipped.
After Mr Bashir integrated the RSF militias into the armed forces in 2013, Lt Gen Hamdan negotiated the deployment of RSF soldiers to Yemen. There, they provided the ground troops for the Gulf-led offensive against Houthi rebels.
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In return Lt Gen Hamdan won important new friends, including Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who he visited last month, in addition to generous remuneration for his troops. Saudi salaries have helped burnish Lt Gen Hamdan’s image in his native Darfur, where some in the communities he once terrorised see positives in his ascent to power.
As recently as 2015 the RSF was responsible for a counter-insurgency campaign in Darfur where its soldiers “repeatedly attacked villages, burnt and looted homes, beating, raping and executing villagers”, according to Human Rights Watch.
But as RSF soldiers have become rich, their wealth has trickled down to the households of Darfur, said Rudwan Daoud, a Darfuri politician.
“Since our independence in 1956 no one from Darfur has ever become as powerful as Hemeti is now,” he said. “He is an outsider who is helping them to break the system and as long as this system exists Darfuris have no future.”
This outsider status is a political advantage, according to Ibrahim Ghandour, Sudan’s foreign minister until 2018. It also makes Lt Gen Hamdan a threat to the country’s traditional political and military leadership. Some see the protests as a Khartoum-based movement of the children of long-favoured elites. Lt Gen Hamdan, by contrast, has the potential to build support from groups across the country, Mr Ghandour said.
“He is not from the centre or the north and that is an added value to Hemeti because this is one of the few occasions that someone from Darfur comes into the top hierarchy of the leadership in this country” he said. “Sudan is not Khartoum and Hemeti knows this very well.”
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