Conflict in Sudan | More than 800,000 people could flee the country

(Khartoum) Heavy fighting shakes Khartoum on Monday, despite the announcement of a truce between the army and the paramilitaries, whose clashes have brought Sudan to the brink of a “catastrophe” and could force “more than 800,000 people to flee the country, according to the UN.

In Khartoum, the capital of five million people, a witness told AFP he heard “eight strikes from military aircraft” while gunshots and explosions still echoed in different neighborhoods.

According to a still very underestimated report, more than 500 people have been killed and 5,000 injured since April 15, the date on which two generals, having taken control of the country after a putsch in 2021, began to fight a fierce battle. .

These clashes between the army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (FSR) of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, known as Hemedti, could lead to the flight of “more than 800,000 people”, warns the UN .

Already 75,000 people are displaced inside this country of 45 million inhabitants. At least 20,000 have fled to Chad and tens of thousands more to Egypt, the Central African Republic, South Sudan and Ethiopia.

And the new three-day truce decreed overnight by the two belligerents does not change anything, assure the experts: like all the previous ones, it actually means that the secure corridors for the evacuation of foreigners are maintained and that the negotiations, which are held abroad, continue.

The conflict took the inhabitants of the country, one of the poorest in the world, by surprise, but also the international community.

“Unprecedented speed”

“The scale and speed at which events are unfolding in Sudan (are) unprecedented,” said the UN on Sunday, which dispatched the head of the United Nations humanitarian agency Martin Griffiths to Nairobi.

For the latter, the “humanitarian situation has reached a breaking point”: the massive looting has “exhausted most of the stocks” of the humanitarian organizations on the spot, in a country where a third of the inhabitants were already suffering from hunger before the war.

The health situation in the country has been a “catastrophe” for decades, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.

Today, explained to AFP the regional director of the WHO, Ahmed Al-Mandhari, “only 16% of hospitals in Khartoum are operating at maximum capacity”, the others have been bombed, occupied by belligerents, or have no more personnel and stocks.

First encouraging sign in more than two weeks of uninterrupted fighting: the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) managed to deliver eight tonnes of aid on Sunday. But this will only allow to treat, according to him, “1500 wounded”.

The WHO has announced that it has sent “six containers of medical equipment by boat to Port-Sudan” (East) and undertakes to pay for “the fuel oil distributed in various hospitals” to run the generators.

For its part, the World Food Program said it was resuming its suspended activities after the death of three of its employees.

“They killed them”

In Khartoum, the trap closes on the inhabitants: when they do not flee, they remain barricaded, trying to survive despite the shortages of food, water and electricity, or even stray bullets which pierce walls and windows.

After prison breaks, bank lootings and fights even in houses, the state of Khartoum has given “furlough until further notice” to civil servants. The police have deployed in the capital, contrasting with their absence in recent weeks.

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 was marked by the bloody civil war started in 2003 between the dictatorship of Omar al-Bashir and ethnic minorities.

In neighboring Chad, arriving on donkeys, on horseback, on carts or on foot, refugees say they were targeted by General Daglo’s FSR.

“They attacked our village and when some of us wanted to leave their house, they killed them,” said Bousseyna Mohamed Arabi, 37.

“Half-hearted efforts”

On the diplomatic level, efforts are continuing: Riyadh wants to convene the Organization of Islamic Cooperation after having received an emissary from General Burhane. The Arab League – deeply divided over Sudan – postponed further discussions until Tuesday, while the United Arab Emirates, allies of General Daglo, announced that they had called the army chief.

Several countries continue evacuations. Two American and Saudi ships thus evacuated nearly 500 people to Saudi Arabia on Monday.

This “exodus reflects a very dark reality”, regrets Alex de Waal, specialist in Sudan. “The United States like other powers making only timid and belated efforts to stop the fighting and help the Sudanese. »

According to him, the states most involved – Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates – 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.

In televised comments, Isaias Afwerki, president of neighboring Eritrea, said the war in Sudan was “to determine who was the (real) author of the Sudanese revolution”.