Are the Janjaweed in bed with the Sudanese government?

I have to give NPR some props for their brief interview with Samantha Powers, a Harvard professor who authored "A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide," and recently traveled to Sudan. This snippet (that I transcribed myself, so there will be some mistakes) proves that not only are the Janjaweed and Khartoum in bed, but they are performing postcoital nipple raspberries on each other as you read this.

NPR: Sudan's UN Ambassador says that his government is, in fact, trying to stop the armed militia. But, at least, I guess in Friday's New York Times, there's an Arab tribal leader believed to be a Janjaweed leader who says, in fact, he's acting on belief of the Sudanese government. Do you have, coming back, any greater understanding of whether or not these two entities are working together?

Samantha Powers: I actually spent a day with Musa Hilal, who is the head of the Janjaweed, and his aim in escorting me around Darfur is to show that Africans and Arabs were living together, that he was a man of peace and reconciliation. But in fact, all he ended up really showing is how he works hand in glove with the government. We were flown around on a government chartered plane. Musa Hilal, the head of the Janjaweed, was carrying [brand name omitted, I could not transcribe it] satellite phones from Khartoum that were supplied to him by Sudanese army officials as we left the airport, and he carried them to his men out in the field. Neither government officials nor Mussa Hillah himself deny the connection. They work together to bring about these horrifiying results.

The interview is around 3 minutes in length, so definitely listen to the whole thing. Samantha also discusses "horrifying tales of decapitation, children being thrown into fires alive, of rape, of women who'd actually been branded by the Janjaweed so they would be marked as having been raped." There was no mention of the rape camps, but I guess there's only so much horrible news they can fit into 3 minutes.

[Crossposted to feministe.]