(Khartoum) Heavy fighting erupted in Khartoum on Sunday after the announcement of a week-long ceasefire agreed to by the army and paramilitaries vying for power in Sudan, supposed to start Monday evening.
The American and Saudi mediators announced that they had obtained from both sides, after two weeks of negotiations in Saudi Arabia, a one-week truce starting Monday “at 9:45 p.m. Khartoum time” (3:45 p.m. Eastern ).
But in more than five weeks of war, a dozen truces have already been announced and then immediately violated.
“We don’t trust them: each time, they announce a truce and resume their fighting immediately,” says Adam Issa, a trader from Darfur, the western region of the country most affected by the fighting with Khartoum.
Since April 15, the war between the army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane and the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (FSR), General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, has claimed a thousand lives in this East African country. ‘Is, one of the poorest in the world, and more than a million displaced people and refugees.
PHOTOS AKUOT CHOL AND ASHRAF SHAZLY, AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE ARCHIVES
Generals Abdel Fattah al-Burhane and Mohamed Hamdane Daglo
The infrastructure has been badly damaged: almost all the hospitals in Khartoum and Darfur, bordering Chad, can no longer operate, and the doctors denounce the bombardments of health establishments by the air force or the RSF artillery.
Most of the five million inhabitants of the capital, holed up in their homes for those who could not flee, no longer have water or electricity.
Humanitarians are calling for safe corridors to deliver medicine, food and fuel, in order to revive services that have been crumbling for decades.
Finally see a doctor
This time, assure Riyadh and Washington, “the agreement reached in Jeddah was signed by the parties and will be supported by a ceasefire monitoring mechanism supported by the United States, Saudi Arabia and [la communauté] international”.
Hussein Mohammed, who lives in Khartoum, wants to believe it: “this time, we hope that the mediators will monitor the belligerents” and that they will be forced to silence their weapons. “This will allow me to take my mother to the doctor: she has to see him every week, but we haven’t been able to go since April 13,” he says.
Sawsan Mohammed hopes to be able to see her parents again. “They live in the north of the capital and I in the south, I haven’t seen them since April 5,” she says.
At the Vatican, Pope Francis called on “the international community to spare no effort […] to alleviate the suffering of the people.
The two rival generals had together ousted civilians from power in a putsch in October 2021. But on April 15, they went to war, and on Friday, General Burhane replaced General Daglo as number two in military power with Malik Agar, a former rebel who signed the peace agreement with Khartoum in 2020. He also appointed three of his followers to the top of the army.
Mr. Agar said on Saturday that he wanted to “stop the war and sit down at the negotiating table”. But for him, these negotiations go through the integration of the FSR into the regular army, a bone of contention between the two generals, which sparked the conflict.
Invective between generals
Since the start of the war, the two generals have been inveighing against each other through the media, but have not spoken since this announcement.
Burhane is a “criminal” who wants to reinstate the military-Islamist dictatorship of Omar el-Bashir, dismissed in 2019, accuses Daglo. Daglo is at the head of “militias supported by foreigners”, with “mercenaries” who have come from elsewhere to destroy Sudan, Burhane replies.
In Khartoum, residents say their homes have been looted or occupied by paramilitaries.
In a country with closed banks and supply convoys interrupted by the fighting, food is becoming increasingly scarce and most agri-food factories have been destroyed or looted.
More than one in two Sudanese needs humanitarian aid, according to the UN, a level never reached in this country of 45 million inhabitants. If the war continues, warns the UN, a million more Sudanese could take refuge in neighboring countries, which fear a contagion.