More than 700,000 people have been displaced by the war in Sudan, the UN announced on Tuesday, and no solution to the conflict is emerging in Saudi Arabia, where negotiations between belligerents have stalled since Sunday. As looting and fighting continue for the 25th consecutive day in Khartoum, hundreds of Beja tribesmen demonstrated in Port Sudan, 850 km east of the capital. They demanded arms from the army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane to fight alongside him the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (FSR) of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo.
“The Beja are ready to be armed,” said Mahmoud al-Bichari, one of the organizers of the demonstration as the crowd chanted “no to negotiations”. “With the war dragging on and insecurity taking hold, there is a growing risk that people will start to arm themselves locally or that the army will try to form a militia to counter the RSF,” he said. AFP Sudanese analyst Magdi Gizouli, from the Rift Valley Institute. Since April 15, the war has claimed more than 750 dead, 5,000 injured and nearly 150,000 refugees.
700,000 displaced
Above all, the number of displaced people inside Sudan itself has jumped: they are now around 700,000, according to the UN. This is “more than double” than a week earlier. Many have fled Khartoum, where five million people live for the fourth consecutive week barricaded in their homes, for fear of stray bullets. On Tuesday, fighting took place in different parts of the capital, according to witnesses. Without water or electricity, with almost dry food stocks and less and less money in their pockets, they survive in the overwhelming heat thanks to networks of solidarity between neighbors and relatives.
The telephone network or the Internet comes and goes according to the efforts of telecommunications companies who are struggling to find fuel to run the generators. Almost no hospital is functioning anymore and most of the humanitarian reserves have been bombed or looted. Just like in Darfur, in the western border of Chad. In the capital, “the main premises of the World Food Program (WFP) have been looted”, the UN reported on Monday. Before the war, one in three Sudanese was already suffering from hunger. If the war continues, up to 2.5 million more people will go hungry daily, the UN predicts.
‘No major progress’
As for the “pre-discussions” only “technical” on a temporary ceasefire that negotiators from both sides must hold in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, they had known “no major progress” on Monday. And Tuesday, nothing filters. For Kholood Khair, a specialist in Sudan, “these talks are more of a decoy than a real platform for finding solutions.” Because, she told AFP, “the United States and Saudi Arabia do not have enough means of pressure on Burhane and Daglo, any more than on Egypt and the United Arab Emirates”, who support each side separately. Negotiations in Jeddah will not give birth to “a ceasefire that will hold”, she predicts when already half a dozen truce promises have been violated in the first minutes of their theoretical entry into force. .
Alongside the Americans and Saudis, the African Union, which suspended Sudan in 2021 and therefore no longer has any major levers of pressure, and Igad, the East African regional bloc to which the country belongs , are trying to organize discussions under the aegis of the President of South Sudan, Salva Kiir. The latter received an emissary from General Burhane in Juba on Monday, for whom the discussions in Jeddah do not diminish “the role that Igad and President Salva Kiir” could play in resolving the crisis.
On Tuesday, it was the head of Egyptian diplomacy Sameh Choukri who visited Salva Kiir after having denounced the day before from Chad “the human tragedy” of the Sudanese conflict and its “direct impact on neighboring countries”. In the midst of an economic crisis, Egypt has taken in more than 70,000 refugees. Chad and South Sudan, neighbors to the west and south, have taken in at least 57,000 people fleeing the war.