SUDAN INSIGHT ALERT: AFP - Darfur attacks seek to derail Sudan's fragile transition: analysts

28/7/2020: AFP - Darfur attacks seek to derail Sudan's fragile transition: analysts

 AFP’s feature piece quotes from analysts who attribute the increased violence in Darfur to “an attempt to sabotage Sudan’s fragile democratic transition.”

 Referencing the Masterei massacre, Marc Lavergne, a Sudan expert at the French National Center for Scientific Research, argued the “attack by 500 armed men in pick-up trucks on a large village requires real organisation.”

 Lavergne added: “it’s a message. The objective is to destabilise the country and show others abroad that the administration in Khartoum is only in control of the capital."

 Darfur expert Abdallah Adam Khater linked the resurgence of violence to militias formerly backed by Omar al-Bashir’s regime fighting to regain their dominance. Khater said that since al-Bashir’s fall, farmers refused to pay taxes to militias, or allow them to continue occupying lands they were forced to flee

 Lavergne added that the militias now employ “force and terror” to fight for their existence.