Fighting raged on Monday (May 8) in Khartoum and other parts of Sudan between the camps of the two rival generals, as negotiations on a truce between their representatives stalled in Saudi Arabia. The 5 million inhabitants of Khartoum live for the fourth week in a row barricaded in their homes for fear of stray bullets.

Without water or electricity, with almost dry food stocks and less and less cash, they survive in the overwhelming heat thanks to the solidarity between neighbors and relatives. The telephone network and the Internet come and go with the efforts of telecommunications companies, which are struggling to find fuel to run the generators.

Clashes have pitted Abdel Fattah Abdelrahman Al-Bourhane’s army since April 15 against the feared paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, two generals who led a putsch together in 2021 but are fighting today for power. The numerous truces announced have hardly been respected and the NGO Acled has already counted more than 750 dead in the country, and the Sudanese authorities 5,000 wounded.

“Massive” looting according to the UN

“The main offices of the World Food Program have been looted,” said Farhan Haq, spokesman for UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, on Monday. He denounced “massive” looting in the country, where, before the war, one in three Sudanese was already suffering from hunger. “Our priority is to achieve a lasting ceasefire” and to allow the arrival of humanitarian aid, said for his part the American ambassador to Sudan, John Godfrey.

Across the Red Sea, in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, emissaries from both sides are supposed to broker a truce. According to a UN official, the UN chief for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, who arrived in Jeddah on Sunday, asked to participate. These “pre-discussions” are only “technical”, tempering Sudanese and international negotiators for several days. They do not concern any political aspect – the country has been in the doldrums since the putsch of 2021.

They will be limited, say the experts, to clearing secure corridors for humanitarian aid arriving on the east coast, in Port Sudan, in order to feed and treat civilians trapped in Khartoum and Darfur, another badly affected region. by the clashes, located in the western border of Chad. In these two areas, almost no hospitals are functioning and most of the humanitarian reserves have been bombed or looted.

“Good Graces”

For Kholood Khair, a specialist in Sudan, the lack of results of these discussions is not surprising. With these talks, the two camps are mainly seeking “to curry favor with the Saudis and the Americans, rather than reaching an agreement”, she told Agence France-Presse. In addition, the supporters of a civilian power, sidelined since the putsch and who make the link with the humanitarians on the ground, are not represented in Jeddah. Nor are there the actors who could change the situation, she notes, with reference to the United Arab Emirates, great allies of Daglo, and Egypt, historical partner of the Sudanese army.

Alongside the Americans and Saudis, the African Union – which suspended Sudan in 2021 and therefore no longer has any major levers of pressure – and IGAD, the East African regional bloc to which the country belongs. , are trying to organize discussions under the aegis of the President of South Sudan, Salva Kiir. The latter received an emissary from General Al-Bourhane in Juba on Monday, for whom the discussions in Jeddah do not diminish “the role that IGAD and President Salva Kiir” could play in the negotiations between the two generals.

The fighting has caused a vast exodus of inhabitants from the affected regions, the UN speaking of 335,000 displaced persons and 117,000 refugees. In the midst of an economic crisis, Egypt has taken in more than 65,000 Sudanese refugees. Its head of diplomacy, Sameh Choukri, was in Chad on Monday, where he sounded the alarm about the “human tragedy” of the conflict and its “direct impact on neighboring countries”, before joining South Sudan, another neighboring Sudan, which together with Chad has taken in more than 57,000 people fleeing the war.