NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) — Sudan appears to be in a civil war “of the most brutal nature” and the world needs a new forum for ceasefire talks, officials said Monday. United Nations humanitarian chief to The Associated Press. .
Martin Griffiths spoke at the meeting of regional leaders in neighboring Ethiopia following the collapse of peace talks in Saudi Arabia in June. Egypt says it will host leaders from Sudan’s peace-seeking neighbors on Thursday, with few details.
“We don’t have a venue, a forum where both sides are present … where we can negotiate the kind of basic agreements that we need to move supplies and people around,” Griffiths said. He called Sudan the most difficult place in the world for aid workers to access and warned that the crisis would only get worse as fighting spread to new areas.
“We have to recreate the architecture we had for some time in Jeddah,” he said of the Saudi- and US-mediated talks. He called those talks “very clumsy, very time-consuming”, but said at least “they have produced some real movement” to facilitate access to help.
Sudan descended into chaos after fighting broke out between army chief General Abdel-Fattah Burhan and his rival, General Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, commander of the paramilitary rapid support forces, on April 15.
The army and RSF have agreed to at least 10 temporary ceasefires, but all have failed. Riyadh and Washington, postponing the negotiations, accused the two forces of not respecting the agreements.
The conflict has killed more than 3,000 people and injured more than 6,000 others, Sudan’s Health Minister Mohammed Ibrahim said last month and warned the true death toll is likely to be much higher. More than 2.9 million people have fled their homes.
“If I were Sudanese, I find it hard to imagine that this is not a civil war… of the most brutal kind,” the UN humanitarian chief said. “It’s partly because it’s not confined to one place, it’s spreading, it’s viral…it’s a threat to the state itself…and if it doesn’t doesn’t qualify as a civil war, I don’t know what’s going on.”
Griffiths said there was an urgent need to create a forum to facilitate humanitarian access and local ceasefires so that trucks and goods can enter specific areas. Any new forum should have greater representation from humanitarian organisations, he said.
In the Sudanese capital, RSF troops appear to have the upper hand in the streets, having commandeered civilian homes and turned them into operational bases. The army retaliated with airstrikes that hit residential areas and sometimes hospitals.
In the western region of Darfur, the other epicenter of the conflict, entire villages have been overrun by RSF fighters and their allied militias, forcing tens of thousands of residents to flee to neighboring Chad.
In West Darfur province, the fighting has turned into ethnic violence, UN officials said, with RSF and Arab militias targeting non-Arab tribes. Activists and tribal leaders in the province say residents have been killed, women and girls raped and properties looted and burned.
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Associated Press writer Jack Jeffery in London contributed.