War in Sudan: warring generals agree to ‘face-to-face’ meeting as UN warns of ‘catastrophe’

A grouping of eight East African countries, IGAD, has said both Sudan’s warring generals agreed to hold a face-to-face meeting as part of efforts to implement a cease-fire and initiate political dialogue to end the country’s devastating war.
In a meeting of the leaders of the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD) held in Djibouti, the regional body secured a commitment from both Sudanese generals to “an unconditional cease-fire and resolution of the conflict through political dialogue,” the bloc said in a statement Sunday (10 December). The current IGAD chair, Sudan’s army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, agreed to a one-on-one meeting with the commander of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, the IGAD statement added. The regional grouping is part of mediation efforts to end the conflict, along with Saudi Arabia and the United States, which facilitated rounds of indirect talks between the warring parties as recently as early November.
According to Alexis Mohammed, adviser to Djibouti’s president, Hemedti and al-Burhan have “accepted the principle of meeting within 15 days in order to pave the way for a series of confidence-building measures between the two parties that lead to the launch of a political process.” Sudan slipped into chaos after soaring tensions between the two warring generals exploded into open fighting in mid-April, devastating the capital, Khartoum, and triggering waves of ethnic killings in Darfur despite several diplomatic efforts to halt the fighting. This comes as the United Nations has warned that it has only been able to reach a fraction of the nearly 25 million people in need of aid eight months into the bloody conflict. The head of the UN’s humanitarian response for Sudan, Clementine Nkweta-Salami, has called the situation “catastrophic”, while aid workers have called it the “forgotten war.”