25 million Sudanese starve and lack water. According to the UN, it is a wild policy from the Sudanese army (SAF) and the paramilitary army RSF. The two armies have been at war against each other for 16 months, and actively cut down on emergency aid to the civilian population along the way. But on Friday, the AFP news agency reports that the parties have agreed to allow emergency aid to pass through two, perhaps three, corridors into Sudan. – That we see this as a glimmer of light says something about how bad it is, says researcher and Sudan expert Liv Tønnessen at the Christian Michelsen Institute. Cracking down on emergency aid Campaigns between the SAF and the RSF broke out in the capital Khartoum in April 2023, but violence quickly spread to the rest of the country. The armies use hunger, thirst and sexual violence as weapons to terrorize the people, reports from the UN show. In addition, several hundred cases of cholera have been registered in the country in recent weeks, after heavy rain spread infection in the drinking water, according to the Sudanese Minister of Health, Haitham Mohamed Ibrahim. Refugees from Sudan come on board boats to South Sudan, the neighboring country to the south. South Sudan has been ravaged by war for several decades, and does not have the resources to take care of its neighbors from the north. Photo: LUIS TATO / AFP The armies have actively blocked trucks with emergency aid from entering the affected areas. And not enough of that. – There is a large aid apparatus on the ground where Sudanese themselves do what they can, with very little means, to provide emergency aid to others. But these groups are also broken down by the armies, says Tønessen. For the groups that organize the humanitarian aid on the ground, they are the same ones that organized the revolution in 2019. Then the people overthrew the Islamist military regime that had been in place for 30 years. – And if there is one thing RSF and SAF agree on, it is that they do not want a people’s government. So they are doing everything they can to break down these groups now, Tønessen explains. Soldiers from the SAF, in the picture, and from the RSF use violence and sexual violence as weapons, the UN has established. Photo: – / AFP Three humanitarian passengers Especially in Darfur, a region in the west of the country, the suffering is enormous. The one humanitarian corridor that the SAF and the RSF have now agreed to protect goes into Darfur precisely, via a crossing point on the border with neighboring Chad. That’s what AFP writes. In August, flaum took the lives of several people who had already been displaced from their homes by the war. Some of those who had to flee again rest here. Photo: EBRAHIM HAMID / AFP In addition, there will be a passage in from Port Sudan, the Red Sea port to which a quarter of a million Sudanese have fled. A third passage, which has not yet been finalized, will be at the town of Sennar, in south-west Sudan. Did not attend peace negotiations The agreement has been negotiated by a group of mediators based in Switzerland for the past ten days. The USA has had a role in the talks, and the African Union, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and the UN have hosted it together with Switzerland. Tom Perriello, the US’s special envoy for Sudan, at the peace negotiations in Switzerland on Friday. Photo: Denis Balibouse / Reuters The RSF sent a delegation to Switzerland, but the SAF did not. Tønnessen does not think that one should fully trust the laws that the two armies come up with. – There have been many negotiations in Sudan over the years, and each time they have fallen into the same trap: men with weapons have been seen to talk about peace, she says. – Then the negotiations are primarily about how the two parties, who are the ones who are preventing peace, should divide the cake between them. But the disaster in Sudan is so great that even the smallest progress is better than nothing, she adds. – This war is so gruesome and exhausting that one sees this really meager progress as a kind of hope. Interested in foreign material? Listen to a recent episode of the foreign affairs editor’s podcast: Published 23.08.2024, at 21.03
ttn-69
RSF and SAF promise to protect passengers for emergency assistance in Sudan – news Urix – Foreign news and documentaries
