The International Criminal Court (ICC) convicted on Monday a leader of the feared Janjaweed militia of playing a leading role in a campaign of atrocities and human rights violations committed in the western Sudanese region of Darfur more than 20 years ago.

The ruling marked the first time the court has convicted a suspect of crimes in Darfur. The three-judge panel ruled that the atrocities, including mass murders and rapes, were part of a government plan to snuff out a rebellion there.

Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman was handed 27 guilty verdicts for crimes committed by his paramilitary group, which he ran during the 2003-2004 campaign on Darfur.

“He encouraged and gave instructions that resulted in the killings, the rapes and destruction committed by the Janjaweed,” said Presiding Judge Joanna Korner, adding that the verdicts were unanimous. 

During the trial, judges heard from 56 witnesses who described horrific violence and the use of rape as a weapon to terrorise and humiliate. 

Abd-Al-Rahman was also found guilty of ordering the summary executions of scores of prisoners in March 2004 and of personally killing captive civilians, beating two men to death with an axe, Korner said.

Abd–Al-Rahman was transferred to ICC custody in 2020, after surrendering in the Central African Republic. He pleaded innocent to charges of war crimes and crimes against humanity when his trial opened in April 2022 and argued he was not the person known as Ali Kushayb.

The judges rejected that defence, saying he even identified himself by his name and nickname in a video when he surrendered.

“Finally a victory for justice, and justice for the victims of Darfur,” Enaam al-Nour, a Darfur rights defender and journalist, said of the verdict.

The judges ruled that Abd-Al-Rahman was a senior commander in the Janjaweed militias during the Darfur conflict that erupted when rebels from the territory’s ethnic central and sub-Saharan African community launched an insurgency in 2003, complaining of oppression by the Arab-dominated government in the capital, Khartoum.

Then-President Omar al-Bashir’s government responded with a scorched-earth campaign of aerial bombings and raids, carried out by the Janjaweed, who often attacked at dawn, sweeping into villages on horses and camels.

Up to 300,000 people were killed and 2.7 million were uprooted from their homes in Darfur over the years.

Al-Bashir has been charged by the ICC with crimes including genocide, but he has not been handed over to face justice in The Hague, despite being ousted from power and detained. He’s being held in a military-run detention facility in northern Sudan since 2019. 

The verdicts came as allegations of atrocities and famine continue to emerge from Sudan in a new conflict.

In July, Khan told the United Nations that war crimes and crimes against humanity continue in Sudan’s vast western Darfur region where civil war has raged for more than two years between the Armed Forces and paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces.

The convictions were a success for the ICC which has been under intense pressure since issuing arrest warrants last year for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for crimes they allegedly committed in Gaza.

Netanyahu and Gallant reject the allegations. The Trump administration has slapped the ICC's top prosecutors and others at the court with sanctions.

Ali Muhammad Ali Abd-Al-Rahman is set to be sentenced at a later date, and faces a maximum life sentence. By Malek Fouda, Euro News