Airstrikes and explosions rocked Sudan again on Monday, a month after the start of a battle for power between two generals, which threatens to escalate further, at the risk of destabilizing the region.
The fighting between the army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane and the paramilitaries of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo’s Rapid Support Forces (FSR) has already left nearly a thousand dead and around a million displaced.
During the night, the two rivals raised their voices: the army chief began a purge within the security forces, the Central Bank and the ministries. And, above all, he announced the freezing of all bank accounts of the FSRs, known for their business empire based on gold mining. In response, General Daglo promised in an audio recording to his adversary that he would be “tried quickly and hanged in a public place”.
In Khartoum, air raids and heavy artillery fire have not stopped for a month. Its five million inhabitants are virtually deprived of water and electricity, and in Darfur, in the west, families remain holed up in their homes, unable to go out and buy food for fear of stray bullets.
A “scenario that repeats itself”
In this region where weapons have been legion since the war that killed around 300,000 people in the 2000s, soldiers, paramilitaries, tribal fighters and armed civilians clash everywhere. In the city of Al-Genaïna alone, 280 people died on May 12 and 13, says the doctors’ union.
“Neighboring houses were completely destroyed in the bombardments,” a resident told Agence France-Presse (AFP). On Sunday, “my house was hit and my sister was injured”.
“We are told that snipers are shooting anyone who leaves their homes,” Mohamed Osman of Human Rights Watch (HRW) told AFP. Trapped, “people injured in fighting two weeks ago are dying at home”. Doctors Without Borders (MSF) stresses for its part that, in the camps for the displaced, “people have gone from three meals a day to just one”.
In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the warring parties are negotiating a “humanitarian” truce to let civilians out and aid in. But they only agreed on the principle of respect for the rules of war, leaving the question of the cessation of hostilities to later “enlarged discussions”.
“The war has been going on for a month, and it’s always the same scenario that repeats itself: in the evening, we are told of negotiations and, the next morning, people are dying and the planes are hitting us”, deplores a resident of Khartoum. “The violence on both sides is increasing day by day,” said another resident of the capital, while, for another, “people are more and more tense every day”.
For researcher Aly Verjee, “if the two camps do not change their way of thinking, it is difficult to imagine a translation on the ground of commitments on paper”.
Fear of contagion
The flow of international food aid, on which a third of the 45 million inhabitants depended, dried up following looting and the death of 18 aid workers. The UN nevertheless announced on Monday its “very first food distributions” in the state of Al-Jazirah, where a good part of the half-million displaced people in Khartoum are located.
The money is missing because the banks, some of which were looted, have been closed for a month. Or because prices have skyrocketed, quadrupling for food or twenty for gasoline.
According to experts and diplomats, each of the two generals thinks they can win militarily thanks to large numbers and foreign support. General Daglo is allied with the United Arab Emirates and, according to the US Treasury, Wagner’s Russian mercenaries, while Egypt supports the army. The two men therefore seem more interested in a long conflict than in concessions at the negotiating table.
Thousands of refugees enter Egypt, Chad, Ethiopia or South Sudan every day. Egypt, which is going through the worst economic crisis in its history, is worried; the other neighboring countries fear a contagion.
In Khartoum, the airport is destroyed, the shopping centers looted and the administrations closed “until further notice”. What remains of the public service has withdrawn to the town of Port-Sudan, 850 kilometers east of Khartoum, spared by the violence and where a reduced UN team is trying to negotiate the delivery of humanitarian aid.
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