Sudan’s revolution could end the conflict in Darfur

MEN WITH guns fill the town of el-Fasher in western Sudan’s troubled Darfur region. At the airport dozens are boarding or disembarking from planes, wearing uniforms of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), a unit formed from Sudan’s murderous militia known as the Janjaweed.

Down the road is the headquarters of UNAMID, the UN peacekeeping force that was brought in 12 years ago to stop a genocide by the Janjaweed and Sudan’s army, whose base is in the centre of town. Seven months after the fall of General Omar al-Bashir, the Sudanese president accused of orchestrating that genocide, el-Fasher still looks like a town on the edge of a war zone.