(Khartoum) The army and the paramilitaries who are vying for power in Sudan accused each other on Thursday of breaking a new truce negotiated by American and Saudi mediators, three days after it came into force.
The war that broke out on April 15 in this East African country has killed more than 1,800 people, according to the NGO ACLED, more than a million displaced people and at least 300,000 refugees, according to the UN. As a result, more than 25 of the 45 million Sudanese now need humanitarian aid to survive, according to the UN.
Since the entry into force of the truce Monday evening, no humanitarian corridor could be secured to let civilians leave and deliver humanitarian aid, according to NGOs.
In the capital Khartoum, most residents live holed up in their homes for fear of fighting and stray bullets, often without running water or electricity and with supplies of food and cash soon depleted.
During the night of Wednesday to Thursday, the paramilitaries of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo’s Rapid Support Forces (FSR) accused their enemy, the army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane. “They launched a series of attacks” and “our forces repelled them”, even shooting down “a MiG combat aircraft”, assures one of their press releases.
On Thursday, the army replied that it had “countered armored attacks by the Rapid Support militias in total violation of the truce”.
Residents of Khartoum, they report that a precarious calm reigns Thursday at the end of the day.
“Motorcycle Gangs”
The Saudi and American mediators, for their part, have been content to repeat since Wednesday that they transmitted to the representatives of the two belligerents “information showing that they had violated” the truce. These emissaries are continuing their discussions in Saudi Arabia.
A ceasefire has been signed […] and the fighting continues! This is unacceptable and it must stop,” said Hanna Tetteh, the UN envoy for the Horn of Africa.
If Washington has promised “sanctions” and if the agreement provides for a “monitoring mechanism”, so far no announcement has been made against one side or the other.
The situation is particularly critical in Darfur, the western border region of Chad, already ravaged in the 2000s by a particularly deadly war.
“Gangs on motorcycles are preventing civil servants and civilians from moving to put in place the humanitarian mechanisms provided for in the ‘temporary ceasefire’,” says Toby Harvard, of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
“The city of Zalengei has been besieged by armed militias for the past few days, without any communication network,” he adds.
“The offices of the UN, administrations, banks, houses have been looted, civilians cannot access the health establishments which are targeted”, he says again.
“Failure of diplomacy”
More than 90,000 refugees have already arrived in Chad, more than 150,000 in Egypt, and the flow does not stop, reports the UN, which expects a million additional refugees if the war does not stop.
The two generals, on the other hand, are ready for a long war, because they are certain of being able to win militarily and therefore reluctant to make concessions at the negotiating table, according to experts.
The conflict was born out of a “calamitous failure of diplomacy”, according to Sudan specialist Alex de Waal. The two generals were supposed to meet on April 15 – the day the clashes began – to agree on the integration of the FSR into the army. This was the sine qua non condition set by the international community for the return to democratic transition and therefore the resumption of international aid, interrupted following the putsch of the two generals in 2021.
Today, with almost all the diplomats having been evacuated from Sudan, the actors mobilized to find a solution to the conflict are far from being representatives of the highest level, deplores Mr. de Waal, considering that the mediators “are trying to plug the gaps as the cyclone approaches.