(United Nations) The prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) said Monday that he hopes to be able to request arrest warrants in the coming months for some of those responsible for the “nightmare” experienced by the population of Darfur, a region of Sudan ravaged by war.
Presenting his half-yearly report to the UN Security Council, Karim Khan deplored a “further deterioration” of the situation over the past six months, “six months of misery, six months of suffering”, where “terror has become commonplace” for civilians.
He particularly stressed the “numerous credible reports of rape, crimes against and affecting children, and large-scale persecution.”
Since April 2023, a war has been raging between the army, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of his former deputy, General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo.
PHOTO IVOR PRICKETT, THE NEW YORK TIMES ARCHIVES
Refugees who fled Darfur territory take shelter in a refugee camp in Adre, Chad, July 9, 2024.
Both sides have been accused of war crimes, including deliberately targeting civilians and blocking humanitarian aid in the conflict that has killed tens of thousands and displaced more than 10 million people, according to the UN.
In this context, the ICC, already seized in 2005 by the UN Security Council concerning the civil war of the early 2000s in Darfur which left around 300,000 dead, opened a new investigation into war crimes in this region in July 2023.
This investigation has made “significant progress,” Karim Khan assured on Monday. “I will be in a position, I hope, in my next report [dans six mois] to announce requests for arrest warrants against some of the individuals most responsible for what we are seeing right now.”
But the prosecutor has asked for help from the international community, and from the Security Council in particular.
“The population is living a nightmare and we all need to look in the mirror and ask ourselves whether we have collectively done all we can,” he said.
PHOTO ARCHIVES AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
A bank branch is set on fire in southern Sudanese capital Khartoum on May 24, 2023.
“The climate of impunity that we see tangibly on the ground in El-Geneina, and increasingly in El-Facher, is fueled by the deep feeling that all lives are not equal and that we are not looking […]that we are indifferent,” he lamented.
According to a UN expert report, between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed in 2023 in El-Geneina, the capital of West Darfur. The capital of North Darfur, El-Facher, has been under siege by the RSF since early May.
“People are traumatized, or buried, or desperately waiting for the international community to hear their cries, see their blood, see and feel their agony and present solutions, not polemics,” the ICC prosecutor said.