Ethiopia’s Abiy in Sudan for talks with army chief in bid to end brutal war

Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed becomes the first foreign leader to visit Sudan for a meeting with army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan since the country’s descent into brutal conflict that has driven nearly 10 million people from their homes and created a humanitarian crisis.
Abiy and al-Burhan met in Port Sudan, the new seat of Sudan’s government, on Tuesday (9 July) for talks that are part of the Ethiopian leader’s efforts to find “sustainable solutions for Sudan’s stability”, according to Abiy’s office. Sudan descended into chaos in April last year when simmering tensions between the country’s military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) exploded into open fighting in the capital, Khartoum and elsewhere in the country. Abiy’s visit takes place only weeks after the RSF took the capital of the southeastern state of Sennar last month, thus bringing the war closer to Sudan’s border with Ethiopia. Until then, the army which was loyal to Burhan had controlled most of the eastern and northern parts of the country.
Meanwhile, the visit of the Ethiopian leader comes days after an Egypt-sponsored meeting of Sudanese political and civil society groups in Cairo that aimed to find ways to end the war engulfing Sudan. While the Sudanese political and civil society groups agreed on Saturday (6 July) on the necessity to end the war, the warring parties, however, didn’t take part in the conference. “Any real political solution to the crisis in Sudan must be based on a purely Sudanese vision emanating from the Sudanese themselves,” Egyptian Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty said in his opening speech. Previous efforts to end the war in Sudan included US-Saudi-mediated talks between the Sudanese army and the RSF but these failed to end the fighting.