Khartoum invaded by violence. The Sudanese capital is shaken, this Sunday, May 21, by several fights after the announcement of a seven-day ceasefire from this Monday, May 22. The paramilitaries and the army are vying for power in this African country. The announcement of their agreement came after two weeks of negotiations in Saudi Arabia, with the help of Saudi and American mediators. In more than five weeks of war, a dozen truces have already been announced and then immediately violated.
“We don’t trust them: each time, they announce a truce and resume their fighting immediately,” says Adam Issa, a trader from Darfur, the western region of the country worst hit by fighting with Khartoum. Since April 15, the war between the army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (FSR), of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, has claimed a thousand lives in this East African country. ‘Is, one of the poorest in the world, and more than a million displaced people and refugees.
The infrastructure has been badly damaged: almost all hospitals in Khartoum and Darfur, bordering Chad, can no longer operate, and doctors denounce the bombardments of health establishments by the air force or the RSF artillery. Most of the five million inhabitants of the capital, holed up in their homes for those who could not flee, no longer have water or electricity. Humanitarians are calling for safe corridors to deliver medicine, food and fuel, in order to revive services that have been crumbling for decades.
This time, Riyadh and Washington assure, “the agreement reached in Jeddah was signed by the parties and will be supported by a ceasefire monitoring mechanism supported by the United States, Saudi Arabia and (the community ) international”. Hussein Mohammed, who lives in Khartoum, wants to believe it: “This time, we hope that the mediators will monitor the belligerents” and that they will be forced to silence their weapons. “It will allow me to take my mother to the doctor: she has to see him every week but we haven’t been able to go since April 13,” he told AFP.
Sawsan Mohammed hopes to be able to see her parents again. “They live in the north of the capital and I in the south, I haven’t seen them since April 5,” she told AFP. At the Vatican, Pope Francis called on “the international community to spare no effort […] to alleviate the suffering of the people.”
The two rival generals had together ousted civilians from power in a putsch in October 2021. But on April 15, they went to war, and on May 19, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan replaced General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo in the post. number two in military power by Malik Agar, a former rebel who signed the 2020 peace agreement with Khartoum. He also appointed three of his followers to the top of the army.
Mr. Agar said on Saturday that he wanted to “stop the war and sit down at the negotiating table”. But for him, these negotiations go through the integration of the FSR into the regular army, a bone of contention between the two generals, which sparked the conflict.
Since the start of the war, the two generals have been inveighing against each other through the media, but have not spoken since this announcement. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan is a “criminal” who wants to reinstate the military-Islamist dictatorship of Omar el-Bashir, dismissed in 2019, accuses Mohamed Hamdane Daglo. Daglo is at the head of “foreign-backed militias”, with “mercenaries” brought in from elsewhere to destroy Sudan, responds Abdel Fattah al-Burhan. In Khartoum, residents say their homes have been looted or occupied by paramilitaries.
In a country with closed banks and supply convoys interrupted by the fighting, food is becoming increasingly scarce and most agri-food factories have been destroyed or looted. More than one in two Sudanese needs humanitarian aid, according to the UN, a level never reached in this country of 45 million inhabitants. If the war continues, warns the UN, a million more Sudanese could take refuge in neighboring countries, which fear a contagion.
