The governor of Darfur asks the ICC to investigate the “crimes” in the fighting between the Sudanese Army and the RSF

Calls on the parties “to sit at the negotiating table to end the war”

June 20 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The governor of the Sudanese region of Darfur, Minni Minnawi, has demanded this Tuesday that the International Criminal Court (ICC) open an investigation into “crimes” committed in the context of the fighting that broke out on April 15 between the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

“I ask the Security Council (of the United Nations) to support the ICC in an investigation into murders and crimes in Darfur,” said the former rebel leader, who stressed that “what is happening in El Geneina and Kutum are absolute crimes “.

Thus, it has stressed the need for transparent investigations so that those responsible for these acts are held accountable, after the president of the Darfur Bar Association, Salí Mahmud, recently indicated in statements to the newspaper ‘Al Taghyir’ that the events in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, were “genocide” and “ethnic cleansing”.

“I ask the parties to the conflict in Sudan to sit at the negotiating table to end the war,” he said, before warning that the murders that have taken place in recent weeks could drag the country into “a war civilian”, as reported by the Sudanese newspaper ‘Al Intibaha’.

Along these lines, Minnawi has condemned the execution of the governor of Western Dafur, Jamis Abdullah Abkar, while he was in RSF custody and has said that the event was “atrocious”. “All conscientious values ​​and human norms were absent,” she has stated.

Minnawi himself, who was the leader of the main faction of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) until the historic October 2020 agreement between the transitional authorities and various rebel groups, declared the Darfur region on June 5 as “a disaster zone” due to the intensification of fighting.

The Darfur region had previously been the scene of a rise in inter-communal tensions despite the aforementioned 2020 peace agreement, which tried to end the situation derived from the 2003 war, which left at least 300,000 dead and more than 2, 5 million displaced.

The Secretary General of the United Nations, António Guterres, expressed his concern last week about the “growing ethnic dimension” of the violence in Darfur, while the UN special representative in the country, Volker Perthes, pointed to possible crimes against the humanity in the framework of the hostilities in this area of ​​the African country.

The current hostilities between the Army and the paramilitaries broke out in the context of an increase in tensions around the integration of the RSF into the Armed Forces, a key part of an agreement signed in December to form a new civilian government and reactivate the open transition after the 2019 overthrow of Omar Hasan al Bashir, damaged by the October 2021 coup, in which the prime minister of unity, Abdallah Hamdok, was overthrown.