No respite after two months of fighting in Sudan

June 15, 2023

After two months of deadly fighting, the conflict in Sudan has escalated with the murder of a governor in the Darfur region, where testimonies of widespread violence against civilians are increasing.

Clashes erupted on April 15 in this East African country, one of the poorest in the world, between the army, commanded by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (FSR) of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo.

“Even imagining the worst, we did not think this war would last so long,” Mohamad al-Hassan Othman, a resident of south Khartoum who fled, told AFP on Thursday.

“We don’t know if we will return home or if we will have to start a new life,” he adds.

The fighting has so far been mainly concentrated in Khartoum and Darfur, a vast border region of Chad, already scarred by a civil war in the 2000s.

The army chief on Thursday accused the RSF of capturing and killing the governor of West Darfur state, Khamis Abdullah Abakar, after he gave a telephone interview to Saudi television on Wednesday, where he criticized the paramilitaries.

The RSF denied being responsible for this “assassination” but according to the UN, “convincing accounts from witnesses attribute this act to Arab militias and the RSF”.

On Thursday, Washington denounced the “atrocities” committed in West Darfur and deemed “credible” reports of human rights violations by the paramilitaries, including “rape and other forms of sexual violence”.

In two months, no scenario of a return to peace is emerging. In Khartoum, entire neighborhoods no longer have drinking water. Electricity runs for a few hours a week and most hospitals in combat zones are out of order.

The violence left more than 2,000 dead, according to the latest report from the NGO ACLED.

More than 2.2 million people have fled, of whom more than a million have left Khartoum, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), while more than 528,000 refugees have arrived in neighboring countries.

For several weeks, Saudi Arabia and the United States mediated ceasefire negotiations.

But the numerous truces announced were almost never respected, preventing humanitarian aid from reaching the millions of desperate civilians.

In a new attempt at mediation, the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) announced on Monday that Kenya would chair a quartet comprising Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan.

The next day, the Sudanese Foreign Ministry had demanded the return to the head of the committee of South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, saying Thursday that the Kenyan government had “adopted the positions of the FSR militia” and “had offered him various forms of support”.

Nearly half the population, or 25 million of Sudan’s 45 million people, now depend on humanitarian aid to survive, according to the UN.

“Many displaced people arriving from the capital lost not only all their belongings and their homes, but also members of their families during the fighting in Khartoum,” said Anja Wolz, a coordinator for Médecins sans Frontières.

The organization spoke on Thursday of a “worrying increase” in residents fleeing the capital.

According to the UN, humanitarian aid has reached up to 1.8 million people, a fraction of those in need.

An international conference on aid to Sudan sponsored by Riyadh is scheduled for June 19 in Geneva.

“Darfur is rapidly heading towards a humanitarian disaster,” warned the UN chief for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, on Thursday.

“The world cannot allow this to happen. Not again,” he said in a statement, as the region was the scene of a war in the early 2000s that claimed an estimated 300,000 lives. and more than 2.5 million displaced.

The head of the UN mission in Sudan, Volker Perthes, said on Tuesday that the violence in Darfur could constitute “crimes against humanity”.

“Massive attacks against civilians, based on their ethnic origins, allegedly committed by Arab militias and armed men in RSF uniforms, are very worrying,” he said.

The Darfur lawyers described “massacres and ethnic cleansing” in El-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, committed by “cross-border militias supported by the RSF”.

In the early 2000s, General Daglo, at the head of the Janjawid Arab militiamen, carried out a scorched earth policy against ethnic minorities in Darfur on the orders of the then dictator, Omar al-Bashir.

The war has killed around 300,000 people and displaced nearly 2.5 million, according to the UN. The Janjaweed officially gave birth in 2013 to the FSR.