The International Criminal Court has convicted a militia leader of crimes against humanity for atrocities committed in the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur.
Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman was found guilty of 27 counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes, including rape, murder and persecution.
He will be sentenced at a later date after a new round of hearings.
This is the first and only trial to date looking at crimes in Sudan since the case was referred to the court by the United Nations Security Council in 2005.
Darfur’s conflict erupted in 2003, when mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms against Sudan’s government, accusing it of marginalising the remote western territory.
Sudan’s then-government mobilised mostly Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed, to crush the revolt.
That unleashed a wave of violence that the United States and human rights groups said amounted to genocide.
Presiding judge Joanna Korner said the trial chamber unanimously found Abd-Al-Rahman guilty of all the crimes he had been charged with, dismissing his defence that he was the victim of mistaken identity.
“He encouraged and gave instructions that resulted in the killings, the rapes and destruction committed by the Janjaweed,” she said.
Ms Korner added that he gave orders to “wipe out and sweep away” non-Arab tribes and told soldiers “don’t leave anyone behind. Bring no one alive”.
Victims of the Darfur conflict said the milestone judgment had restored some faith in the ICC and its slow procedures.
“As victims, the ruling is a victory for us and for justice, because the crimes he committed had huge impacts for the last 22 years. We were displaced, made refugees in camps,” said Jamal Abdallah, 32, who was displaced from his home in West Darfur as a child by the Janjaweed in 2003.
There are still outstanding arrest warrants against Sudanese officials, including one accusing former President Omar al-Bashir of genocide charges.
According to Sudanese army sources, Mr Bashir and former defence minister Abdelrahim Mohamed Hussein are in military custody in northern Sudan.
While sources said another ICC fugitive, interior minister Ahmed Haroun, was at large after escaping prison at the outbreak of war, Reuters met him in northern Sudan in April of this year. At the time, he dismissed the ICC as a colonialist institution.
Since the start of the ICC trial three years ago, conflict has erupted again in Sudan.
The new fighting that erupted in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has unleashed waves of ethnically driven killings, caused mass displacement and created what the UN has called the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
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