Airstrikes, gunfire and explosions were heard again in Khartoum on Monday (May 1st) despite the announcement of a truce in the fighting between the army and paramilitaries that has brought Sudan to the brink of “catastrophe”. humanitarian and health according to the UN.
The fighting, which left 528 dead and 4,599 injured according to largely underestimated official figures, has opposed since April 15 the two generals in charge of the country since their 2021 putsch, trapping millions of Sudanese.
Army chief Abdel Fattah Al-Bourhane and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary commander Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, known as “Hemetti”, had agreed to extend a ceasefire to midnight on Sunday. three days, after mediation by the United States and Saudi Arabia.
Several truces without a future
Since the beginning of the conflict, several truces announced were immediately violated. According to experts, they only mean that the secure corridors for the evacuation of foreigners are maintained and that the negotiations, which take place abroad, continue. So far, the two generals refuse direct talks. “The scale and speed at which events are unfolding in Sudan [is] unprecedented,” said the UN on Sunday, which dispatched its chief for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, to the region in an attempt to ” provide immediate relief” to the residents.
For Mr. Griffiths, the “humanitarian situation is reaching a breaking point” in the country, one of the poorest in the world. The massive looting has “depleted most of the stocks” of aid organizations, he said. In a country where a third of the inhabitants suffered from hunger before the war, the World Food Program said Monday to resume “immediately its activities”, suspended after the death of three of its employees.
First humanitarian aid delivered
For the World Health Organization (WHO), the already “well-known” health crisis in Sudan has now become a “catastrophe”. After twenty years of international embargo, “the health system was facing multiple crises, with extremely fragile infrastructures”, explained Ahmed Al-Mandhari, the WHO regional director. Today, he says, “only 16% of hospitals in Khartoum are operating at full capacity”; the others have either been bombed, or occupied by belligerents or have no more personnel and stocks. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) managed to deliver 8 tonnes of aid on Sunday, a first since the start of the conflict, which, he warned, will only treat “1,500 wounded”.
The UN has identified 75,000 internally displaced people. At least 20,000 fled to Chad, thousands more to the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Ethiopia. In total, up to 270,000 people, according to a United Nations estimate, could flee the fighting which affects twelve of the eighteen states of this country of 45 million inhabitants. The authorities of the State of White Nile, in the south of Sudan, announced the arrival of 70,000 displaced “in recent days” in its camps. “More than 800,000 people” could flee the deadly fighting in Sudan, Filippo Grandi, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, warned on Twitter on Monday.
Residents of the capital, when not fleeing, remain barricaded, trying to survive despite food, water and electricity shortages. Khartoum state has given civil servants “furlough until further notice”, while police have been deployed to prevent looting.
Evacuated nationals
The Arab League is meeting in Cairo on Monday to discuss the situation, after the United Arab Emirates, allies of General Daglo, announced that it had called the army chief. General Bourhane sent an emissary to Riyadh on Sunday, which calls for a meeting on Wednesday of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
The UN is particularly concerned about the situation in West Darfur, where around 100 people have been killed in fighting in which it says civilians are involved. This region had been marked by the bloody civil war started in 2003 between the dictatorship of Omar Al-Bashir and ethnic minorities.
Many countries, including France, Germany and the United States, have evacuated their nationals from Sudan and several of them continue the evacuations. This “exodus reflects a grim reality”, with the United States like other powers making only “timid and belated efforts to stop the fighting and help the Sudanese”, observes Alex de Waal, a British researcher specializing in Sudan. According to him, the states most involved in this country, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates in the lead, have never “wanted to see a democratic revolution in the Arab world”.
The putsch of October 2021 had closed the parenthesis of the democratic transition begun with the fall in 2019 of dictator Omar Al-Bashir. Generals Bourhane and Daglo, now in a struggle for power, formed a common front during this putsch to oust the civilians with whom they shared power. But differences then appeared and, for lack of agreement on the integration of the FSR into the army, degenerated into open war.
