Sudan’s war rages, humanitarian situation aggravates
QAMISHLI, Syria (North Press) – Sudan today stands on the brink of civil war that could cause large displacement, hunger, and ethnic cleansing following a two-week clashes that have claimed the lives of more than 400 people so far.
The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) estimated on Monday that some 73,000 people have already fled to neighbouring countries such as Chad, Egypt, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia and Eritrea.
Raouf Mazou, UNHCR Assistant High Commissioner for Operations, warned that numbers could swell unless the crisis is resolved quickly.
“In consultation with all concerned governments and partners, we’ve arrived at a planning figure of 815,000 people that may flee into the seven neighbouring countries,” Mazou said.
The UNHCR estimated that the majority, 580,000, will be Sudanese, with 235,000 South Sudanese seeking to return home “in what we would label as adverse conditions”.
Roughly one third of all 48 million people required humanitarian assistance prior to the conflict, the UNHCR added.
Meanwhile, the Western media has centered on the evacuations of foreign nationals in Sudan. After clashes between the two main factions erupted in Khartoum, the capital, and other cities more than two weeks ago, a number of Western and regional governments started conducting evacuations by air and by sea.
On Monday, it appeared that the warring generals – Lt. Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, Sudanese army chief, and Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as Hemedti, commander of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), had agreed to send representatives to negotiate a more-lasting truce in a third-party country, possibly Saudi Arabia, The Washington Post reported.
Tension between the Sudanese army and the RSF had been building for months. Both forces together toppled a civilian government in the 2021 October coup, overthrowing the autocracy of Omar al-Bashir.
The RSF dates back to the regime of Omar al-Bashir, Sundan’s dictator who was deposed by popular protests in 2019. As the ‘Janjaweed’, RSF forces under the command of Lt Gen Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo, also known as ‘Hemedti’, committed war crimes and crimes against humanity in the region of Darfur in 2003. The mass killings and rapes which occurred were directed by the al-Bashir government, human rights groups have said. The US called it a “genocide.”
The Janjaweed is a mostly Sudanese Arab militia that operates particularly in Sudan’s Darfur region, and in eastern Chad. It remains active to this day and is rumored to operate in faraway Yemen, as well. Dangers posed by the Janjaweed add to the prospect of increased collaboration across the region among violent extremist organizations whose political and ideological goals align.
The friction was brought to a head by an internationally-backed plan to launch a new transition with civilian parties. A final deal was due to be signed earlier in April, on the fourth anniversary of the 2021 October coup, according to The Independent.
Both the army and the RSF were required to cede power under the plan and two issues proved particularly contentious: one was the timetable for the RSF to be integrated into the regular armed forces, the second was when the army would be formally placed under civilian oversight, Joe Sommerlad wrote for The Independent.
When fighting broke out on 15 April, both sides blamed the other for provoking the violence. The army accused the RSF of illegal mobilization in preceding days and the RSF, as it moved on key strategic sites in Khartoum, said the army had tried to seize full power in a plot with Bashir loyalists, Sommerlad added.
Both al-Burhan and Dagalo cast themselves as stewards of the country’s democratic transition, which began in 2019, but was interrupted by a power grab that they both carried out in 2021. Now, al-Burhan and Dagalo are battling for greater control of a country and its wealth of resources.
“This war is telling a resounding truth, which is just now finally being heard,” wrote academic Azza Ahmed Abdel Aziz for the Middle East Eye. “Sudan is a nation that is unraveling under the weight of accumulated injustices, inequalities and unaddressed grievances of parts of its population, which have informed its history as a post-colonial nation state.”
While Folahanmi Aina, an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute in London, wrote for the Foreign Policy saying that events in Sudan might have stirred the greater region’s hornet nest, in reference to the possibility that the war could have a domino effect across the already troubled Chad Basin – a country that has suffered from the devastating actions of violent extremist non-state actors including Boko Haram and its splinter group the Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP) over the past decade.
Reporting by John Ahmad