Musa Hilal

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Musa Hilal (b. 1961) is Sudanese Arab Janjaweed militia leader and advisor to the minister of internal affairs.^[1] He is also the leader of the Darfuri Mahamid clan, which in turn belongs to the Rizeigat tribe, who is mostly famous for supplying recruits to the government-backed Janjaweed, the government-backed militias who have earned notoriety for their brutal attacks in the western Sudanese Darfur region over the past few years. His role in the crimes committed in Darfur and his current freedom within Sudan — flying in Sudanese military transport between his homes and wives in Khartoum and his base in Mistariha, North Darfur — illustrate the broader role and impunity of the militias throughout Darfur.

Sheikh Musa Hilal has apparently repeatedly been seen by eye witnesses in Kebkabiyah in Northern Darfur dressed in a general's uniform holding long speeches calling for the ethnic "cleansing" of the black African inhabitants of the Darfur region.

Musa Hilal himself claims to be fully and totally innocent and never having called for any violence in Darfur. As he put it in his own words when he was interviewed by Human Rights Watch on 27 September 2004: "... I am not a criminal. Thank God I’m not afraid. I’ve never had any fear. If there’s a concrete complaint and an investigation is opened against me, I can go to court -- nobody is above the law -- but not because of allegations made by Ali al Haj and Khalil Ibrahim, who are rebel leaders, who make up dark information and give to the UN, and they put my name on the list. That’s not right."

Hilal claims as well that everything which has to do with the Janjaweed is directly being organized and directed from the federal government in Khartoum under Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir.

Hilal does admit, though, being recruiting men to join the Janjaweed militias, although he consistently denies to be part of the military command chain of the Janjaweed, or to have any leading position at all in this respect, but merely being an influential sheikh in his area. In his own words: "It is a lie. Janjaweed is a thief. A criminal. I am a tribal leader, with men and women and children who follow me. How can they all be thieves and bandits? It is not possible."

However: "Sheikh Hilal's claim that he has no control over any militia does not bear scrutiny", said Alex de Waal, an Africa scholar who studies Sudan. "He is at the center of all of this," de Waal said.

In letters to government officials and other tribal leaders, Sheikh Musa Hilal has repeatedly said his fighters are engaged in a jihad, or holy war, and will not disarm even if the government demands it.

"We will not retreat," he wrote in one such letter in 2004 to the leaders in Khartoum. "We continue on the road of jihad." Trying to disarm his men, he wrote, would be "cowardly," and impossible to enforce.

Another communique from Sheikh Hilal's headquarters in 2004, obtained by de Waal, demanded that the militias "change the demography of Darfur and empty it of African tribes."

On 21 January 2008, the Federal Government of Sudan announced the official nomination of Musa Hilal as the chief advisor of the Ministry of Federal Affairs in Sudan.