Sudan is sinking into a spiral of death and destruction at an “unprecedented” speed, the UN chief said on Monday, urging donors to pay to alleviate the suffering of tens of millions of people.
Antonio Guterres’ statement marked a donors’ conference held in Geneva, amid a three-day ceasefire in Sudan that appears to have restored calm to the capital Khartoum.
“Without strong international support, Sudan could quickly become a place of anarchy, which causes insecurity throughout the region,” the UN secretary-general warned at the opening of the meeting.
In two months of conflict more than 2,000 people have died, according to the NGO Acled, and more than 2.5 million have been forced to flee elsewhere in Sudan or in other countries.
But donors have so far been reluctant to fund the UN humanitarian aid plan.
Of the $3 billion it is calling for for this year, only 17% is funded, while 25 million Sudanese, more than half the population, depend on humanitarian aid to survive.
Germany, co-organizer of the conference like the EU, Qatar, Egypt or Saudi Arabia, has pledged to pay 200 million euros by 2024, half of which will be money. charges not yet assigned, and Qatar has pledged $50 million.
The European Union has pledged €190 million in humanitarian and development aid.
On the ground, air raids and artillery bombardments have ceased since Sunday morning in Khartoum, where five million inhabitants are surviving in scorching heat.
Monday, the second day of the 72-hour truce which is due to end Wednesday at 6 a.m. local time, no fighting was heard in the city, according to several residents interviewed by AFP.
Fighting broke out more than two months ago, on April 15, between the army, commanded by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo.
After a dozen truces systematically violated, the belligerents have pledged to allow humanitarian aid to pass through this East African country, one of the poorest in the world.
But everything is missing. The arrival of the rainy season is raising fears of epidemics, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said on Monday, describing the garbage that accumulates, the corpses that are still lying in the open air in hard-to-reach areas. And he points out that out of desperation, many residents are forced to drink unsafe water from the Nile or other sources.
The Red Cross, UN agencies and other NGOs must also help neighboring countries of Sudan, themselves plunged into an economic crisis or in the grip of violence, to welcome the refugees.
For several weeks, Saudi Arabia and the United States have acted as mediators between the two camps. They obtained short truces but not the opening of negotiations for a plan to end the crisis.
Qatar’s Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdelrahman Al-Thani at Monday’s conference hailed the mediation effort, as well as that of the African Union and Igad, the East African bloc. to which Sudan belongs.
“There is no other solution than a political one,” he insisted.
The situation is particularly worrying in Darfur, a vast region in western Sudan, where soldiers, paramilitaries, tribal fighters and armed civilians clash.
Also in Geneva, during a session of the UN Human Rights Council devoted to Sudan on Monday, British Ambassador Simon Manley said he was “particularly horrified by the stories of increasing ethnic violence and sexual violence. and sexism in parts of Darfur”.
Already devastated in the 2000s by a war that left around 300,000 dead and nearly 2.5 million displaced, according to the UN, Darfur is heading towards a new “humanitarian disaster”, warned the UN, referring to possible “crimes against humanity”.
In Darfur, “the conflict now has an ethnic dimension”, warned the UN, the African Union and Igad in a joint statement, “with targeted attacks based on the identity of people and displacement of populations” .
According to the UN, more than 150,000 people have fled Darfur to Chad.
19/06/2023 17:59:35 – Geneva (AFP) © 2023 AFP