The United Nations denounces that, twelve weeks later, humanitarian access is almost impossible: “We cannot work under the barrel of a gun”
July 15 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The war between the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), added to the new explosion of inter-community conflicts in the Darfur region due to these combats, begins its fourth month of “unspeakable suffering” for the population this Saturday. which is currently trapped in the main theaters of combat, in the midst of mass exoduses and a campaign of atrocities directed with particular virulence against women and girls.
The discrepancies between the Army and the powerful RSF on the constitution of the future Armed Forces ended up exploding on April 15 with the beginning of armed confrontations in the center and south of the country’s capital, Khartoum, and in the city of Meroe, 200 kilometers to the north.
The fighting meant the collapse of the paralyzed negotiations for the achievement of a political transition agreement towards a civilian government in the country, plunged into a spiral of chaos since the overthrow in 2019 of Omar al Bashir, who ruled the country with an iron fist. for 30 years.
The departure of the dictator left power in the hands of a military government that ended up assuming control of the country after accusing civil societies, instrumental in the fall of Al Bashir, of having been incapable of reaching a transition agreement where the military insisted to play a predominant role.
While the military leader, Abdelfatá al Burhan, insisted on taking the reins of a transition plan that contemplated a kind of hybrid civic-military authority, civil groups opposed to the initiative lamented the lack of international commitment when it came to supporting parallel projects that contemplated the absence of the Army in the politics of the future Sudan.
Everything ended up collapsing on April 15, the beginning of a diplomatic and population exodus and the beginning of the open confrontation between Al Burhan and the paramilitary leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, alias ‘Hemedti’, which has continued for three months amid high the fire — mediated by the US and Saudi Arabia — constantly ignored by the warring sides. Neither leader has agreed to face-to-face negotiations and they have questioned regional mediation efforts led by Kenya, which they accuse of a lack of neutrality.
The chaos is absolute and the victims impossible to verify. While the head of the United Nations Integrated Assistance Mission for the Transition in Sudan (UNITAMS) Volker Perthes — declared ‘persona non grata’ by the Sudanese authorities — has assured that the current government has lost control of the country, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) estimates “thousands dead, more than two million internally displaced and hundreds of thousands of refugees in Egypt, South Sudan” and Chad. 80 percent of the country’s health system is now destroyed.
The situation in Darfur is even more elusive. The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Karim Khan, has announced the opening of an investigation for war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Sudanese region, which has included the recent killing of 87 members of the Masalit community, allegedly executed by the RSF, who have denied any connection, while Save the Children has warned that 12-year-old girls are being systematically raped in what is practically a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
For all these reasons, the United Nations, in its statement rejecting the three months of violence, considers that Sudan “is now one of the most difficult places in the world for humanitarian workers to operate.”
“We cannot work under the barrel of a gun. We cannot replenish stocks of food, water and medicine if the brazen looting of these stocks continues. We cannot deliver if our staff are prevented from reaching people in need,” he laments this Saturday. Martin Griffiths, the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator.
“Every day the fighting continues, the misery deepens for Sudanese civilians. The recent discovery of a mass grave on the outskirts of the West Darfur capital, El Geneina, is just the latest evidence pointing to a resurgence of the ethnic killings in the region. The international community cannot ignore this harsh echo of the story in Darfur,” he added.
“We must all redouble our efforts to ensure that the conflict in Sudan does not turn into a brutal and endless civil war with grave consequences for the region. The people of Sudan cannot afford to wait,” he added.
