The international community pledged some $1.5 billion on Monday (June 19) to help war-torn Sudan, which the UN says is descending into destruction and violence at an “unprecedented” speed. This sum is only half of the total that humanitarian agencies estimate they need in a country where 25 million Sudanese, more than half the population, depend on humanitarian aid to survive.
In two months of war between the army, commanded by General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo said “Hemetti”, more than 2,000 people are dead, according to the NGO Acled, and more than 2.5 million have been forced to flee elsewhere in Sudan or abroad. “This crisis will require sustained financial support and I hope we can all keep Sudan at the top of our priorities,” said Martin Griffiths, the UN chief for humanitarian affairs, after a conference of donors organized on Monday in Geneva.
According to figures provided by the UN, the United States, with 550 million dollars, is at the top of the pledges, while France has pledged 44.77 million dollars. Germany, co-organizer of the conference like the European Union (EU), Qatar, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, has pledged to pay 200 million euros by 2024, Qatar has pledged $50 million and the EU pledged €190 million. The conference was held halfway through a three-day ceasefire in Sudan that appears to have restored calm to Khartoum.
A spiral of death and destruction
On the ground, air raids and artillery bombardments have ceased since Sunday morning in the Sudanese capital where millions of inhabitants are surviving in the scorching heat. Monday, the second day of the 72-hour truce which is due to end Wednesday at 6 a.m. local time (4 a.m. GMT), no fighting was heard in the city, according to several residents interviewed by AFP.
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. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), however, denounced “the non-respect of the truce” on Monday when “a transfer of wounded soldiers” from the army, in the hands of the paramilitaries, failed due to “fire” . The army and the FSR accuse each other of having violated the truce.
On Monday, General Daglo thus denounced “the continuous violations” of the ceasefire committed by the army, which in return accused the RSF of having “broken the truce” and left “fifteen dead and dozens of injured civilians. in Darfur, a vast region in western Sudan, where the conflict is particularly violent.
UN chief Antonio Guterres said Sudan was sinking with “unprecedented speed” into a spiral of death and destruction. For him, it “could quickly become a place of anarchy, which causes insecurity throughout the region” if the international community turns its back on it.
Very worrying situation in Darfur
The arrival of the rainy season is raising fears of epidemics, the 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. Qatari 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 as Sudan refused the IGAD quartet outright.
The situation is particularly worrying in Darfur where soldiers, paramilitaries, tribal fighters and armed civilians clash. Over the past four days, “15,000 Sudanese including nearly 900 wounded” have fled widespread violence against civilians in Al-Geneïna, the capital of West Darfur, to find refuge in Adré in Chad, according to Doctors Without borders (MSF). According to the UN, more than 150,000 people have fled Darfur to Chad.
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 people’s identity and displacement of populations”. . Already devastated in the 2000s by a war that killed around 300,000 people and displaced nearly 2.5 million according to the United Nations, Darfur is heading for a new “humanitarian disaster”, warned the UN, referring to possible “crimes against humanity”.
