Africa on fire: No hope for peace as Sudan war intensifies

By Martina Schwikowski

WASHINGTON: The humanitarian crisis in Sudan is reaching catastrophic proportions after three months of fierce fighting between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the opposing Rapid Support Forces paramilitary organization (RSF).

Ahmed Soliman, a Horn of Africa researcher at the London-based think tank Chatham House, told DW that the war in Sudan is becoming increasingly entrenched on both sides, as more and more people have to suffer its consequences. “The worst fighting is taking place around Khartoum and surrounding towns, but also in Darfur,” Soliman said. He added that the destruction of settlements and infrastructure in the region only adds to the overall devastation caused by the conflict, which has already resulted in massive waves of displacement and serious human rights violations.

According to the latest figures published by the UN Organization for Migration, more than 3 million people have already been forced to flee their homes during the relatively short period of bloody conflict. The UN refugee agency UNHCR meanwhile warned that an “all-out civil war” could lead to the “destabilisation” of the entire region.

Soliman said the refugees included 2 million internally displaced persons, more than half of whom are children. At least 180,000 people have been forced to seek safety in neighboring Chad, especially those fleeing violence in the crisis-ridden province of Darfur, which has been plagued by conflict for 20 years.

This makes the conflict all the more explosive, Soliman said. He added that, because the violence in Darfur is ethnic in nature, with cyclical patterns of violence, “there is no quick solution to this bloody conflict.” The violence of the past few months hardly serves as an indicator of what might yet follow: Since mid-April, Sudan’s army chief, Abdel-Fattah al-Burhan, and his adversary, RSF leader Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, also known as “Hemeti,” have used deadly violence in their wrestling for power. All attempts to bring calm to the situation have failed. Ceasefires between the warring parties have repeatedly been broken, and attempts at mediation have not yielded any success, Soliman said. On Monday, the Intergovernmental

ity on Development in East Africa invited the parties to attend a peace summit in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.

Neither al-Burhan nor Dagalo attended the meeting. The RSF sent a representative to the summit, while Sudan’s government declined to attend the event altogether. Sudan’s Foreign Ministry has accused Kenya of taking sides in the conflict, saying the government would not be willing to participate in peace talks until Kenya relinquishes its chairmanship of the regional mediating states.

The Sudanese government claimed in a recent statement that Kenya that had “adopted the positions of the RSF militia, sheltered its members and offered them various forms of support.” Previous peace talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, also failed to produce results in May, further dimming hope for the warring factions to discuss their differences anytime soon. Soliman said the warring parties ultimately sought to achieve a strategic military capture of the other rather than laying down their arms. “They are currently unwilling to end the war and prioritize peace,” Soliman said. Youssif Izzat, political adviser to RSF leader Dagalo, offered a different take on recent developments in Sudan. Izzat said leaders of the Sudanese Armed Forces are simply not interested in negotiations. He said that, during the talks in Saudi Arabia in May, a ceasefire had been agreed upon between the delegations.