UN envoy to Sudan warns of ethnic conflict risk, potentially leading to prolonged conflict with regional implications
UNITED NATIONS
Sudan’s warring parties continue their fight without regard for the laws and norms of war, UN envoy to Sudan said on Monday.
Homes, shops, places of worship and water and electricity installations have been destroyed or damaged, Volker Perthes said during a briefing at the UN Security Council.
For weeks the conflict-hit African nation has been engulfed by violence between the army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group.
More than 700 people have been killed, including 190 children and 6,000 others were injured, said Perthes.
Over a million have been displaced and more than 840,000 have sought shelter in rural areas and other states while another 250,000 have crossed Sudanese borders, according to the UN
“The growing ethnicization of the conflict risks engulfing the country in a prolonged conflict, with implications for the region,” he warned.
“The responsibility for the fighting rests with those who are waging it daily: the leadership of the two sides who share accountability for choosing to settle their unresolved conflict on the battlefield rather than at the table. It is their decision that is ravaging Sudan. And they can end it.”
Disagreement had been fomenting in recent months between the two sides over integration of the RSF into the armed forces — a key condition of Sudan’s transition agreement with political groups.
Sudan has been without a functioning government since fall 2021, when the military dismissed Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok’s transitional government and declared a state of emergency in a move decried by political forces as a “coup.”
The transitional period, which started in August 2019 after the ouster of President Omar al-Bashir, had been scheduled to end with elections in early 2024.
