Fighting continues to rage on Monday evening in Sudan but Saudi and American mediators have welcomed the five-day extension of a truce never respected supposed to allow the delivery of vital humanitarian aid for the country on the brink of famine .
Residents of Khartoum told AFP of fighting in the northern suburbs and artillery fire in the south of the capital of more than five million inhabitants.
As usual, the army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo accused each other of attacking, ensuring that they were only responding to assaults. The FSR thus accused the army of carrying out a deadly air raid in Khartoum on Monday.
Washington and Riyadh, for their part, note every day “new violations of the ceasefire” but without ever activating the “sanctions” or the “monitoring mechanism” that they said they were putting in place at the announcement of the first truce.
Since its start on May 22, families have been able to get out quickly to buy food and drink, for twice as much as before the war.
But thousands of others continue to hide in their homes, many without running water or electricity, for fear of stray bullets.
Aid workers have only been able to deliver small quantities of food or medicine because their staff cannot travel due to the fighting and their shipments arriving by air are still blocked at customs, they say.
The situation is worse in Darfur, a vast region in the west bordering Chad, already ravaged by war in the 2000s, according to Toby Harvard of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
“Sporadic fighting between soldiers and paramilitaries in recent days in El-Fasher, North Darfur, up to the interior of the Abou Chouk IDP camp, have caused civilian casualties,” he said.
Homes have been looted and tens of thousands of people have been again displaced by this fighting which is “a flagrant violation of the ceasefire and prevents the distribution of humanitarian aid”, he adds.
In East Darfur, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), “about thirty newborns have died in a hospital since the fighting began, including six in the same week due to lack of oxygen during the power cuts. “.
Since the start of the war on April 15, more than 1,800 people have been killed, according to the NGO ACLED. More than a million others have been forced to move elsewhere in Sudan and nearly 350,000 outside the country, according to the UN.
Neighboring states fear a contagion and are calling for aid from the UN, which in return repeats having received only a tiny share of funds from its donors.
On Monday, the UN warned that with the war, Sudan has joined the list of ten countries that could soon experience famine.
In a few days, the rainy season will begin and with it its cohort of epidemics, from malaria to cholera.
The country will have to deal with three-quarters of the hospitals out of service in the combat zones, according to the doctors’ union, and others overwhelmed in the spared areas but where the displaced are piled up.
If the belligerents have agreed to extend the truce, on the ground, the signals are not for appeasement.
After the army recalled its retirees, tribes in the east of the country who are demanding arms, the governor of Darfur, an ex-rebel now an army ally, called on civilians to take up arms.
The Oumma party, the oldest in the country, ousted from power by the putsch led in 2021 by the two generals now at war, denounced an “attempt to drag the country into civil war”.
Yassir Arman, a leader of the bloc calling for civilian power, the Forces of Freedom and Change (FLC), accused supporters of the ousted dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir of seeking “to exacerbate ethnic differences” to plunge the country in chaos and that the people demand their return.
The FLC also warned against calls for “an all-out civil war”, calling on both sides to follow the African Union’s (AU) exit plan.
The latter reiterated its readiness on Saturday to apply a roadmap to Sudan and the Europeans gave it their support. Washington has said it supports this initiative, but with every upheaval in Sudan, Americans and Saudis are carrying out a diplomatic process parallel to regional efforts.
Truce or not, a new danger will remain present: more and more projectiles having not exploded litter the roads and even the buildings, warned the UN.
29/05/2023 21:30:13 – Khartoum (AFP) – © 2023 AFP