KHARTOUM, Sudan — When the first winds of a revolution blew across Sudan last winter, threatening to upend decades of corrupt and destructive rule, President Omar Hassan al-Bashir needed to find a scapegoat. He got Ayob Omer.

Mr. Omer, a 28-year-old veterinary student from Darfur, was scooped up by intelligence thugs outside his university dorm in Khartoum on Dec. 22, days after the first anti-government protest. He was spirited away to a safehouse where he said he was interrogated, tortured with electricity and, after a few days, forced to sit before a camera and read a prepared statement.

“I participated in the protests,” he said in a recording later broadcast on state television. “I was carrying a bag and a knife.”

His ordeal was part of a propaganda drive orchestrated by Mr. al-Bashir’s security services to blame the revolt on saboteurs from Darfur, the western region where up to 300,000 people have died since 2003 in a government-sponsored campaign to subdue it through pillage, murder and rape. The state intelligence service claimed that Mr. Omer, along with five other Darfuri dissidents who were also forced to appear on TV, had been trained by Israel.

That effort was an abject failure. Not only was Mr. al-Bashir ousted by his own lieutenants in April and then sent to prison, but Darfuris have also emerged as some of the loudest and most impassioned supporters of Sudan’s continuing revolution. Casting aside decades of war, suffering and racial discrimination in a country where the epithet “slave” is still in use, Darfuris are seizing Sudan’s fragile political opening to make their voices heard like never before.

Outside the military headquarters in Khartoum, where thousands are demanding a swift transition to civilian rule, Darfuris stand defiantly at the gates of the military that persecuted them for years. Some hold banners with graphic photos that depict the atrocities they say were visited on their community: piled corpses, torched villages, rape victims sitting mutely.

In street speeches, Darfuri leaders issue strident demands for Mr. al-Bashir, currently incarcerated at a notorious Khartoum prison, to be dispatched to the International Criminal Court in The Hague to face decade-old charges of genocide and war crimes in Darfur.

Sometimes other Sudanese come up to the Darfuris at the protest site, tears in their eyes, offering solidarity and even apologies for the years of suffering.

“Today we feel proud to be Sudanese,” said Adam Osman, a 23-year-old student from Jebel Marra, a mountainous district of Darfur that in 2016 was subjected to “scorched earth” tactics according to Amnesty International. “We are born again; we are renewing our country. I am flying without wings.”

Around him people chanted: “Darfur, we are with you. Darfur, you are our brothers.”

But under the tide of euphoria and hope run currents of apprehension and fear over what comes next in Sudan. Talks between protest leaders and Sudan’s generals over who should hold power during a transitional period before elections are in their fifth week and growing increasingly testy.

On Wednesday, protest leaders threatened to start a campaign of civil disobedience, including mass strikes, if their demands are not met. The generals insist they will not disperse the protest with force, yet they show few signs of compromise.

Darfuris, in particular, have reason to be worried. The same generals who ousted Mr. al-Bashir also led the fight in Darfur during the 2000s, when a conflict rooted in ethnic tensions quickly spiraled into a human rights catastrophe that attracted global attention through celebrities like the actor George Clooney, and that confirmed the pariah status of Sudan’s American-sanctioned government.

Some Darfuri rebel factions declared a cease-fire in 2015, but sporadic violence has continued. On the other side, Sudanese generals have turned to other ventures, like recruiting young Darfuris to fight in the Saudi-led war in Yemen.

Others generals have grown rich from extensive business ventures in the region, including gold mining and cattle trading, or have partnered with the European Union to stifle illegal migration across Sudan’s eastern desert. Many are unapologetic about their role in the war.

“We were fighting the rebels, not the people,” said Lt. Gen. Salah Abdelkhalig, the head of Sudan’s air force and a veteran of the Darfur campaign, during an interview in which he denied the military had committed any atrocities.

While the army treats the protesters camped outside its gates in Khartoum with kid gloves, it has been more aggressive in Darfur, far from the scrutiny of news cameras. Last Sunday, soldiers shot dead a protester outside a military base in Nyala, the capital of South Darfur.

Of the 90 people killed in the protests throughout Sudan since December, 14 have died in Darfur, the largest number of any area outside Khartoum, according to the Central Committee of Sudan Doctors, which has been tabulating casualties.

Yet for all that, many Darfuris fervently hope this revolution can change everything.

One night last week in Khartoum, Migdad Ahmed lay down to sleep on the street outside Sudan’s naval headquarters, exhausted yet exhilarated.

The 21-year-old student had arrived in Khartoum a day earlier, part of a six-bus convoy that crossed Sudan, traveling 900 miles over three days, from the city of Geneina in western Darfur. Several of his uncles had been killed in the war, he said, and his family lives in a refugee camp where they rely on international aid to survive.

Now, for the first time, he felt respected and heard in the capital.

“When my voice gives out,” he said, pointing to a whistle tied to a string around his neck. “I use this.”

For decades, Mr. al-Bashir cemented his authority by exploiting the differences inside his own country, favoring light-skinned Muslim Arabs from the central Nile Valley over darker-skinned, ethnically African people from the south, Darfur and the Nuba Mountains. Longstanding racial tensions grew deeper. Wars erupted.

But Mr. al-Bashir’s efforts to paint the recent revolt against his rule as a Darfuri ploy quickly backfired. Soon after the footage of Mr. Omer and the five other activists, evidently tortured and coerced, appeared on television in December, a new chant erupted during anti-government protests: “You arrogant racist, we are all Darfur!”

Yet the prejudice that motivated the Darfur conflict is deep-rooted and will not vanish easily, said Iether Ibrahim, 30, a doctor in Khartoum. In private, some northerners still throw about the insult “slave,” she said, in reference to a time when Arabs captured, traded and owned ethnically African tribespeople.

“Here, people deal with you according to your shape and your color,” she added, pointing to her own face as an example.

People in Khartoum often mistook her for an Arab, she said, because her mother is from northern Sudan. On being corrected, the same people are often doubly shocked to learn that her father is the Darfuri rebel leader Khalil Ibrahim, the founder of a group called the Justice and Equality Movement, who died in a bombing in 2011. Mr. Ibrahim’s brother, Gibril, currently leads the group.

While she is not part of the armed struggle, Ms. Ibrahim said Darfuris were demanding accountability for past crimes. “To build a new country, justice must be done,” she said.

But that seems unlikely under the ruling Military Transitional Council, because its leaders might also have to answer for their actions.

Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudan’s interim military leader, was once a commander in Darfur. His deputy, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan, known as Hemeti, is the leader of a military force originally drawn from the Janjaweed, a horse-riding militia that carried out the worst atrocities in the 2000s.

Both men are backed by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, which are hostile toward popular revolutions across the Middle East.

“We should not forgive what he did,” said Mr. Omer, the tortured student activist, in reference to Hemeti. “Anyone who committed a crime should be subject to trial. We won’t accept anything else.”

If Sudan’s revolution disappoints, and its generals refuse to cede power to the civilians, some Darfuris warn that optimism could sour into dangerous divisions with the potential to fracture Sudan even further.

But for now, Mr. Omer, a supporter of the Darfuri armed resistance, believes in the power of protest.

“The Sudanese people have finally broken the fear,” he said. “The revolution has started a discussion among the people, created space for unity. With that, we can make the country we want.”

Follow Declan Walsh on Twitter: @declanwalsh

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