Human Rights Watch (HRW) on Tuesday (July 11) urged the International Criminal Court (ICC) to investigate “war crimes” in Darfur, western Sudan, where fighting continues despite calls for a ” negotiated exit from the crisis”.

On Monday, during a meeting in Addis Ababa, the “quartet” of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), an East African regional organization to which Sudan belongs, had called “to sign a ceasefire unconditional”, in front of the representatives of the Sudanese paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The regular Sudanese army, at war against the FSR, is boycotting this meeting.

For the experts, the leaders of the two camps, the paramilitary general Mohammed Hamdan Daglo (known as “Hemetti”) and the chief of the army, general Abdel Fattah Al-Bourhane, have made the choice, since the beginning of the fighting, the April 15, a war of attrition and a military victory rather than concessions at the negotiating table.

No ‘return to pre-April 15 status quo’

For US Ambassador John Godfrey, evacuated from Sudan at the start of the war, “a military ‘victory’ for one of the two belligerents would mean an unacceptable human cost and damage for the country”, already one of the poorest in the world. world.

Rather, it would be necessary to “find a negotiated way out of the crisis”, warned the diplomat. According to him, this “must not – and cannot – be a return to the status quo before April 15”, when the two generals who face each other today held the reins of the country together following of a putsch.

Molly Phee, the US Under Secretary of State for Africa, is due to meet regional and Sudanese officials in Addis Ababa on Tuesday.

It was in the Ethiopian capital that IGAD called on Monday to “study a possible deployment” in Sudan of the East African Standby Force (EASF) “to protect civilians and guarantee humanitarian access”, an action whose operational reality faces many challenges.

At the head of the quartet, the Kenyan President, William Ruto, demanded, in addition to an unconditional ceasefire, “a humanitarian zone, within a radius of 30 km around Khartoum, to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian aid,” which more than half of Sudanese now need to survive. It is his position as president of the quartet that the Sudanese army rejects. She accuses Mr. Ruto of being on the side of the FSR.

At least 28 summary executions

The FSRs have been under fire from human rights defenders for nearly three months. Because the war – whose toll, very underestimated, is 3,000 dead and 3 million displaced and refugees – carries its share of abuses. Looting, rape, executions on ethnic grounds: many residents of Khartoum and Darfur, a region in the west of the country bordering Chad, told AFP the chilling account of the atrocities committed, according to them, mostly by the FSR.

For HRW, dozens of people were killed and injured when “several thousand” fighters from the RSF and Arab tribes attacked the town of Misterei in Darfur in late May. Arriving at dawn on “pickup trucks, motorbikes and on horseback”, they “almost burned down” the town of 46,000 people, according to HRW.

In front of them, armed civilians from the Masalit community (one of the main non-Arab ethnic groups in Darfur), from a local self-defense group, responded. “The RSF and Arab tribes summarily executed at least 28 Masalit,” the NGO reports. Civilians were hunted down in schools and mosques where they had taken refuge. The attackers went to schools at least eight times in search of men whom they summarily executed, according to testimonies.

“Many of these violations amount to war crimes,” said HRW, which urges the ICC – which is already investigating crimes committed in Darfur from the early 2000s – to take up the Misterei attack. “These mass killings and the total destruction of Misterei prove the need for a stronger international response to this spreading conflict,” argues Jean-Baptiste Gallopin, researcher at HRW.