Sudanese government rejects UN peacekeeping force

Sudan’s military led government, which has been mired in a civil war for over a year, rejected a call for sending UN peacekeepers to the country, amid a surge in atrocities against civilians.

Earlier this month, the UN’s Independent International Fact-Finding Mission for Sudan urged sending peacekeepers to the country and imposing an arms embargo there due to the surge of attacks on civilians by both warring sides.

“Both the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), as well as their respective allies, were found to be responsible for patterns of large-scale violations, including indiscriminate and direct attacks carried out through airstrikes and shelling against civilians, schools, hospitals, communication networks and vital water and electricity supplies,” the UN said.

The RSF has not yet commented on the proposal.

Meanwhile, the head of the World Health Organization (WHO) called on the “world to wake up and help Sudan out of the nightmare it is living through.”

Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus was speaking during a visit to Port Sudan – the main hub for aid agencies and new headquarters of the government, after it was driven out of the capital, Khartoum, by the RSF.

“The scale of the emergency is shocking, as is the insufficient action being taken to curtail the conflict and respond to the suffering it is causing,” Dr Tedros was quoted as saying.

In Darfur, in particular, the situation verges on genocide as residents say they watched militiamen go door-to-door hunting down civilian men in non-Arab neighborhoods, as the town’s army barracks were captured.

The massacre, in which at least 73 civilians were killed, was led by commanders from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group currently engaged in a conflict with Sudan’s military.

In the 16 months since the RSF first began their bloody war with the Sudanese army, their military advances across the Darfur region have often been marked by mass ethnic violence.

The conflict, which has spread to 14 of the 18 states in Sudan, has killed and wounded tens of thousands of civilians, displaced nearly 8 million people and forced two million more to flee to neighboring countries. The warring parties have exacerbated the crisis by obstructing humanitarian access, the report said.