The UN now counts more than 700,000 internally displaced people in Sudan. Nearly 150,000 refugees have also fled to neighboring countries.
The exodus of civilians has accelerated with more than 700,000 people displaced by the war in Sudan, twice as many as a week ago, the UN announced on Tuesday, with no end in sight after more than three weeks of fights.
Looting and fighting continued for the 25th consecutive day in Khartoum. In Port Sudan, a coastal town 850 kilometers east of the capital, hundreds of Beja tribesmen demonstrated demanding arms to fight alongside the army.
“The Beja are ready to be armed,” said Mahmoud al-Bichari, one of the organizers of the demonstration as the crowd chanted “no to negotiations”.
More than 750 dead
Since April 15, the war has pitted the army chief, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, against General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, commander of the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (FSR), who became rivals after leading the putsch together. October 2021.
“With the war dragging on and insecurity taking hold, there is a growing risk that people will start to arm themselves locally or that the army will try to form a militia to counter the RSF,” he told the media. AFP Sudanese analyst Magdi Gizouli, from the Rift Valley Institute.
The conflict has already left more than 750 dead and 5,000 injured. Nearly 150,000 refugees have fled to neighboring countries while those displaced inside Sudan now number more than 700,000, according to the UN, more than double the 340,000 counted last Tuesday.
Looting in Khartoum
Many have fled Khartoum, a city of five million people where those who remain now live barricaded in their homes.
Without water or electricity, with almost dry food stocks and less and less money, they survive in the overwhelming heat thanks to networks of solidarity between neighbors and relatives. On Tuesday, fighting took place in several neighborhoods, according to witnesses.
At the start of the conflict, the army claimed that “astronomical sums” had been stolen during fighting around a Central Bank branch.
On Tuesday, the Federation of Sudanese Banks acknowledged that “looting” affected “certain banks in Khartoum”, but affirmed that the savings of the Sudanese are “fully preserved”.
Humanitarian reserves bombed and looted
The telephone network or the Internet comes and goes according to the efforts of telecommunications companies who are struggling to find fuel to run the generators.
Almost no hospitals are functioning and the majority of humanitarian reserves have been bombed or looted. Just like in Darfur, in the west of the country, bordering Chad.
Before the war, one in three Sudanese suffered from hunger. If the war continues, up to 2.5 million more people will go hungry daily, the UN predicts.
“These talks are more of a decoy”
As for the “pre-discussions” on a temporary ceasefire that the two camps must hold in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, they do not seem to know any progress.
The UN chief for humanitarian affairs, Martin Griffiths, who arrived in Jeddah on Sunday and already left, offered the two sides a commitment to “guarantee the passage of humanitarian aid” via a declaration of principle, said UN Deputy Spokesman Farhan Haq on Tuesday.
For Kholood Khair, a specialist in Sudan, “these talks are more of a decoy than a real platform for finding solutions”.
Alongside the Americans and the Saudis, the African Union, which suspended Sudan in 2021, and Igad, the East African regional bloc of which the country is a part, are trying to organize discussions under the aegis of the President of South Sudan, Salva Kiir. The latter received Monday in Juba an emissary of General Burhane.
South Sudan’s supply under threat
The conflict “threatens South Sudan’s supply of food and basic necessities as well as its oil exports which pass through Port Sudan”, a vital outlet on the Red Sea for this landlocked country, Hanna Serwaa Tetteh recalled on Tuesday. , the UN special envoy for the Horn of Africa.
The UN has warned that of the 800,000 South Sudanese refugees settled in Sudan, 200,000 could make the journey in the opposite direction.
“A challenge”, warned Hanna Serwaa Tetteh, for South Sudan, where “two thirds of the population already needs humanitarian aid”.
On Tuesday, the head of Egyptian diplomacy Sameh Choukri visited Salva Kiir, after having denounced the day before “the human tragedy” of the conflict and its “direct impact on neighboring countries”.
Egypt has taken in more than 70,000 refugees, Chad and South Sudan at least 57,000.
