The Sudanese military on Wednesday suspended US-Saudi Arabia-brokered talks on a ceasefire to allow humanitarian aid to the famine-hit country, accusing the paramilitaries of failing to honor their commitments.
General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane’s army and General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo’s Rapid Support Forces (FSR) paramilitaries, which have been at war in Sudan since April 15, regularly committed to ceasefires that have never been honored.
The latest began on May 22 before being extended by five days on Monday.
But on Tuesday fighting raged again in Khartoum and the Darfur region in western Sudan. According to the NGO ACLED, the war has already claimed more than 1,800 lives.
On Wednesday, the army “suspended its participation in the negotiations taking place in Saudi Arabia,” a Sudanese government official said on condition of anonymity.
The army, represented in Jeddah by figures known for their hard line against the FSR, made this decision “because the rebels have never applied any of the points of the temporary ceasefire agreement, which provides for the withdrawal of their hospitals and homes,” he explained.
Occupied hospitals and homes
“The army is ready to fight to victory,” General Burhane said Tuesday while visiting his troops in Khartoum.
Even before the war, Sudan was one of the poorest countries in the world. Every third resident suffered from hunger, long power cuts were the order of the day and the health system was on the verge of collapse.
According to the UN, after almost seven weeks of war, 25 of the 45 million Sudanese need humanitarian aid to survive.
According to the doctors’ union, three quarters of hospitals in combat zones are out of order because they have been bombed or because fighters are occupying them. The others have to deal with almost empty reserves and failed generators due to lack of fuel.
Many residents report that they were chased out of their homes by RSF fighters or that after fleeing they learned from their neighbors that combatants had settled there.
Entire districts of Khartoum were stripped of their residents. According to the United Nations, more than 700,000 people have fled the capital of more than five million people.
famine and displacement
In all, nearly one and a half million people, mostly Sudanese but also refugees in Sudan, were displaced from their homes.
More than a million remain in the country, but 350,000 more have joined neighboring countries fearing contagion violence. Half are in Egypt in the midst of an economic crisis, the others in Chad, South Sudan, the Central African Republic or Ethiopia, where violence is rife.
All of these states are demanding help from the United Nations, which in return reiterates that they have received only a tiny fraction of the funds from their donors.
Despite the humanitarian emergency – according to the UN, the country is on the brink of famine and the rainy season is approaching with a series of epidemics – the two warring parties are fighting on.
American and Saudi mediators have so far played the diplomatic game, refraining from authorizing airstrikes, artillery fire and ground-recorded combat.
“They are betting that by continuing talks between the two parties, they will increase the chances of getting pledges that will ultimately be better respected,” Sudan expert Aly Verjee told AFP.
The Sudanese government official said the RSF “continued to break the ceasefire and attacked military areas in Khartoum and Omdurman again” in its suburbs on Tuesday.
The RSF accused the army of attacks “against their military positions” in Khartoum on Tuesday.
The fighting is fiercest in Darfur, a border region of Chad where some areas are completely cut off from the world and have no electricity or telephones.
There, new calls for civilians to be armed are raising fears of a “total civil war”. Today, supporters of dictator Omar al-Bashir, who was ousted in 2019, are returning energetically, experts say.