The head of UN humanitarian affairs discusses the passage of aid in Saudi Arabia on Sunday with envoys from the army and paramilitaries who are negotiating a truce after more than three weeks of deadly fighting.
Sunday, and like every day since April 15, fighting resounds everywhere in Khartoum where the five million inhabitants survive, barricaded for fear of stray bullets, without water or electricity and with reserves of food and money soon to dry up. .
While Americans and Saudis assure that the belligerents are negotiating a truce in Saudi Arabia, the army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of rival General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo do not say anything about the discussions between their emissaries .
“The army delegation will only talk about the truce and how to properly implement it to facilitate humanitarian access”, limited itself to commenting for AFP General Nabil Abdallah, spokesman for the army. .
The FSRs have revealed nothing about this new mediation, after several “ceasefires” broken in the seconds following their announcement.
“Lowest Common Denominator”
UN chief for humanitarian affairs Martin Griffiths joined talks in Jeddah on Sunday after calling on the two generals in Sudan on Wednesday to make ‘specific commitments’ to let in humanitarian aid and get out captured civilians. in the crossfire.
For their part, Ryad and Washington “welcome” the opening of a dialogue and urge the belligerents to “be actively involved” but have announced neither the formal start of the talks nor their content.
Meanwhile, witnesses report to AFP fighting and air raids on different districts of Khartoum.
“We were overflown by fighter planes and we heard explosions and anti-aircraft missiles,” said Ahmed al-Amin, a resident of the Haj Youssef district, in the northeast of the capital, to AFP. .
The war left 700 dead, 5,000 injured, 335,000 displaced and 115,000 refugees.
For Aly Verjee, a researcher at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, for this ceasefire to be different from previous ones, it would be necessary to specify its operational details.
Before going to war, Generals Burhane and Daglo together ousted civilians from power with their 2021 putsch.
Two years earlier, the 45 million Sudanese had hoped to regain democracy: the army accepted under pressure from the street to dismiss the dictator Omar el-Bashir, in power for 30 years.
But the transition slipped, and negotiations under international auspices to bring the FSR under the command of the army only exacerbated tensions between generals. On April 15, when they had promised to meet to negotiate, they preferred to fire their guns.
After that failure, Verjee said, negotiations in Jeddah are focused on “the lowest common denominator of the international community”: the cessation of hostilities. Because “for the aftermath, there is no apparent consensus”.
To discuss it, the FSR dispatched to Jeddah relatives of General Daglo and his powerful brother Abderrahim, who passes for the financier of the FSR via his gold mines.
On the army side, there are high-ranking officials known for their hostility to the paramilitaries.
long war
Ryad, ally and funder of both camps, and Washington, whose lifting of sanctions brought Sudan back to the concert of nations in 2020, want to take precedence over regional initiatives.
At the Arab League, Egypt has joined this joint initiative by inviting itself to a liaison committee that is supposed to lead to a ceasefire and secure humanitarian corridors.
Their main competitor remains Igad, the East African bloc led by South Sudanese President Salva Kiir, historic mediator in Sudan.
The African Union lost its leverage when it suspended Sudan after the 2021 putsch, experts say.
With the UN, these two blocs nevertheless “welcomed” the negotiations in Saudi Arabia on Sunday, while the head of the Arab League, Ahmed Abou el-Gheit, called on him to “support” the “indirect negotiations of Jeddah” for avoid “the fragmentation of Sudan”.
From the headquarters of the pan-Arab organization, the head of Egyptian diplomacy Sameh Choukri called for “avoiding a regional slippage” while his country, in the midst of an economic crisis, has already welcomed more than 56,000 refugees.
He will visit Chad and South Sudan, countries bordering Sudan, on Monday, Cairo announced.
The war will be long as the two belligerents seem to have the same combat capacities and to be reluctant to negotiate, agree the analysts.
If the war lasts, the UN has already warned, up to 2.5 million more people will suffer from hunger – a scourge that already affects a third of Sudanese.
In Darfur (west), civilians were armed to take part in clashes mixing soldiers, paramilitaries and tribal or rebel fighters which left nearly 200 dead.