Puzzle No. 57: When?

From February 2003, rebel groups in Sudan's western Darfur region, chiefly the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, took up arms against the Khartoum government, citing political and economic marginalisation. The government responded with a brutal counterinsurgency, arming and unleashing Arab militias known as the Janjaweed, who carried out mass killings, systematic rape, and the burning of villages, predominantly targeting non-Arab communities. Between 2003 and 2005 an estimated 200,000 or more civilians died from violence, disease and starvation, and roughly two million people were displaced, many into camps in neighbouring Chad. In 2004 US Secretary of State Colin Powell described the campaign as genocide, and in 2009 the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir, the first the court had sought against a sitting head of state. Darfur became a defining humanitarian cause of the 2000s and a major test of the international community's stated 'responsibility to protect'. The Janjaweed's successor, the Rapid Support Forces, would later drive Sudan's catastrophic 2023 civil war.

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