Day: June 15, 2023

A catastrophic food crisis looms in Sudan if fighting doesn’t stop, said Freydoun Borhani, team leader with aid organization Mercy Corps in Gedaref state, on the Ethiopian border.

“Right now, it’s planting season in Gedaref state, for example. People there must buy seeds for plantation. The price of the seeds go very high. And this creates a problem for the farmer,” Borhani said.

But that’s not the only challenge farmers face, according to Borhani.

“Besides that, the number of people who moved here have created a lack of food in the market, and the price of food is very high, and some people cannot afford to purchase this food,” Borhani said. “Some places, it’s 134 percent increase. Wheat flour, rice or sugar also 100 percent or more.”

Mercy Corps had plans to distribute seeds to about 2,100 farmers in Gedaref, Nyala and Kordofan states, but for security reasons it will be able to give seeds to only 700 farmers in Gedaref starting next week.

The latest 24-hour cease-fire negotiated by the United States and Saudi Arabia expired early Sunday, and the war is showing no signs of ending, as fighting continues in parts of the capital, Khartoum, and elsewhere.

Kenya’s President William Ruto said he and other East African leaders plan to meet the Sudanese generals in person next week to discuss ways to end the war. The announcement follows a gathering of heads of states and government convened by the East African bloc IGAD, or Intergovernmental Authority on Development, in Djibouti earlier this week.

“We have taken the decision that the quartet of Kenya, Ethiopia, South Sudan and Somalia will in the next 10 days meet face to face with General [Abdel Fattah al-] Burhan and General [Mohamed Hamdan] Dagalo in a face-to-face engagement, so we can speak to them directly on behalf of IGAD with a view of stopping the war that is raging in Sudan,” Ruto said following the IGAD talks.

Macharia Munene, professor of history and international relations at the United States International University in Nairobi, told VOA the in-person meeting with the two generals is a good step but there are more factors at play.

“The problem with IGAD and AU [African Union] is that it depends on the EU [European Union] and external forces of resources to operate,” Munene said. “That’s the main problem … sometimes it’s difficult to agree on anything, in part because the players are dependent on advice and resources from outside.”

Abdisalan Adan, education and peace advocate and the director of Maarifa College in Kenya, told VOA bringing them to the table might be the solution, but there’s much to accomplish between now and then.

“First of all, bridging the gap and bringing the trust among the two [generals] and from our side, Kenya, we should see the conflict from a wider perspective, then working very softly in terms of bringing all actors together, international actors together, not only IGAD, but bring on board African Union, European Union and Americans,” he said.

Dr. Edgar Githua, a lecturer at USIU and Strathmore University specializing in international relations, peace and conflict, told VOA that Kenya’s Ruto is a good person to lead the negotiations.

“I think he’s seen conflict within Kenya. Remember, in Kenya we had our post-election violence in 2007, and he was part of that mediating team … so he understands what internal conflicts are all about; in Sudan, it’s an internal conflict, so he understands the dynamics,” Githua said.

Ruto also said officials will try to persuade the warring factions to establish a humanitarian corridor in the next two weeks and, following that, initiate a process of an inclusive national dialogue.

But in a statement on Thursday, Sudan’s foreign ministry said it preferred South Sudanese leadership of the initiative.

Since the war started about two months ago, more than 1.65 million people have been displaced, including more than 1.2 million within the country and about half a million to neighboring countries. As long as the conflict continues, Mercy Corps says humanitarian needs will grow among the populations that were already severely food insecure.

Source: Voice of America

A provincial governor in Sudan is the latest victim of the military conflict that’s been raging in the East African nation since mid-April. And the killing of the governor – in the West Darfur State – may have happened – simply because of an interview he gave to a TV station. TRT World’s Andy Roesgen has the latest.

Source: TRTworld.com

The governor of Sudan’s West Darfur region, Khamis Abdullah Abkar, was killed on Wednesday as the fighting that erupted in mid-April has spread across the conflict-ridden country to the western cities.

Abkar was allegedly assassinated just hours after publicly accusing the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and allied militia of genocide against the Masalit tribe.

According to Al-Hadath TV, where he made his final comments before his death on Wednesday, the governor warned that the killings in West Darfur were indiscriminate and called for international intervention.

The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) said in a statement on Thursday that the governor had been kidnapped and killed by the RSF.

“The head of the Sovereignty Council, Lieutenant General Abdel Fattah, denounced the treacherous attack carried out by the Rapid Support Forces, in which they targeted the governor of West Darfur, Khamis Abdullah Abkar, and killed him in the city of El Geneina,” the SAF stated.

In response, the RSF, while denying the allegations, accused the army of “igniting the tribal war” in West Darfur and “fueling the fighting by arming the tribes.”

“Our forces have completely distanced themselves from interfering in the conflict in West Darfur and have continued to follow developments of events and warn against them,” it said in a lengthy statement on Thursday.

The RSF condemned Abkar’s killing in the “strongest terms” and demanded an independent investigation into the events that led to his and hundreds of other people’s deaths.

Volker Perthes, the UN secretary-general’s special representative in Sudan, said on Tuesday that he was “alarmed” by the deterioration of the situation in West Darfur’s capital, El Geneina, as violence in the country has taken on a “ethnic dimension.”

The Darfur Bar Association, which monitors the conflict in the region, said on Wednesday that artillery strikes hit civilian homes in the South Darfur capital of Nyala, after earlier reporting that 17 people had been killed by shelling on Monday and 100 had died in the previous five days.

Meanwhile, the UN high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi, reported on Thursday that violent clashes in and around displaced persons’ camps in North Darfur had killed over 100 people.

Darfur, home to some 80 tribes and ethnic groups, has witnessed its worst conflict since 2003, when 300,000 people were killed and 2 million were displaced, according to research published by the Ohio State University. That spate of hostilities came when Arab militias were deployed to fight non-Arab rebels.

Source: Russia Today

The weeks of fighting in Sudan between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) troops have caused a humanitarian catastrophe. Since the conflict began in April 2023, more than 850 civilians have been killed and over 3,500 injured, according to Radhouane Nouicer, the UN expert responsible for Sudan.

There is looting, murder and rape every day. Hundreds of thousands of people are fleeing the soldiers’ vicious attacks.

“This is the destruction of a country in a way that is dehumanizing its people,” Nouicer said in a recent statement. “What is going on is as bad as anything I have seen in conflict zones over the course of my long career. It is horrifying, tragic, brutal, and completely unnecessary.”

According to the UN, both sides of the conflict are riding roughshod through international humanitarian law. Meanwhile, hospitals and doctors lack everything; chaos reigns at the borders and corpses lie in the streets. People risk being shot in an attempt to salvage the dead.

Destruction of cultural monuments and invaluable documents

The country’s cultural treasures are also in great danger. Important sites have already been destroyed by the RSF. As the magazine The Continent reports: “The war in Sudan is destroying not just the country’s future, but also the country’s past.”

Observers have compared the devastation of libraries, museums and places of worship to the Taliban’s destruction of Afghanistan’s cultural treasures.

According to the report in The Continent, historically important historical sites such as the Omdurman old market have been burned down by fighting in the Nile metropolis. The Mohamed Omer Bashir Center for Sudanese Studies, a library at Omdurman Ahlia University, was also destroyed there. Handwritten manuscripts and rare books simply no longer exist.

Hamid Bakheet, a poet and member of the Sudanese Writers’ Union, told DW about the importance of the destroyed Mohamed Bashir Center: “it was one of the most important sources of written heritage because it contains important references in Sudanese history.”

Mummified human remains among loot The National Museum in Khartoum was also stormed and exhibits, including ancient mummies, were destroyed or damaged.

According to the report in The Continent, a video can be seen of one of the RSF fighters presenting millennia-old mummies as victims of Sudan’s former dictator Omar al-Bashir, who was ousted in 2019, and pledging revenge for their deaths.

Hamid Bakheet also told DW about the destruction of important exhibits, such as rare animal species preserved at the Natural History Museum, as well as attacks on libraries and publishers, such as Dar Madarek, Dar Al-Kandaka and the “Booksellers’ Complex” in Khalifa Square.

The country’s cultural memory in grave danger

But why are the RSF destroying their own country’s heritage? The fighters are often accused of ignorance, but Bakheet instead believes “that the destruction is being done deliberately, in an attempt to erase historical facts. They want to create a new era that starts with them.”

“On top of this there is hatred. Hatred for education and learners in general. They seem to want to reshape society into an ignorant society with no memory,” added Bakheet.

According to Bakheet, protecting Sudan’s remaining cultural treasures is extremely difficult, if not impossible, because the soldiers do not respect any conventions. “Perhaps intellectuals can start a campaign to collect references and rare historical books to recover what is written from this memory, but as for the contents of museums, there is no way to recover them and, and herein lies the disaster.”

Sudan has a rich history. There are 200 pyramids in the country alone, almost twice as many as in neighboring Egypt.

Source: Deutsche Welle