conflicts
Sudan remains contested – further ceasefire failed
Smoke rises from a residential area in Sudan’s capital Khartoum. photo
© Marwan Ali/AP
Sudan has not calmed down for days. Ceasefires are broken again and again. The plight of the civilian population is getting worse.
There is still no end in sight to the violence in Sudan. On Tuesday evening, hopes of a possible ceasefire, which representatives of both sides had previously announced for the evening, were initially dashed. The fighting in Khartoum continued without interruption, a dpa reporter reported on site.
According to media reports and eyewitnesses on Twitter, explosions and shots could also be heard. It was the third failed ceasefire since the fighting began on Saturday. Since then, according to the United Nations, 270 people have died and 2,600 have been injured.
In Sudan, which has been politically unstable for years, the two most powerful generals and their units have been fighting for supremacy since Saturday. The two men have led the country of around 46 million people since a joint military coup in 2021. De facto President Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who is supreme commander of the army, is fighting his deputy Mohammed Hamdan Daglo, leader of the powerful RSF.
The paramilitary group RSF accused the Sudanese army of “violating the ceasefire agreed through international mediation” in a statement on Twitter yesterday at 6:14 p.m. “In the first hours of the declared ceasefire” there were attacks on RSF forces, it said. This information could not be independently verified.
G7 foreign ministers call for an end to violence
Agreed three-hour ceasefires had already failed on Sunday and Monday. Thousands of civilians are therefore trapped in their apartments and houses, often without electricity and without the possibility of getting food, water or medicine, said the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk in Geneva.
The G7 foreign ministers called for an end to the violence yesterday. “We call on all actors to return to negotiations and to take active steps to reduce tensions,” said the concluding paper of the ministers’ meeting in Karuizawa, Japan.
According to the Bundeswehr, it is preparing to support the Federal Foreign Office (AA) in the event of a militarily secured evacuation of German citizens from Sudan. According to a spokeswoman on Monday, a “low three-digit number” of German nationals in Sudan was registered in the so-called crisis prevention list of the Federal Foreign Office. A spokesman for the Federal Ministry of the Interior said on request that a federal police officer – as a security officer at the embassy – and several German employees of the UN mission UNITAMS are currently in Sudan.
A UN spokeswoman in Geneva declined to comment on whether there are plans for the 4,000 United Nations employees in Sudan, including 800 foreigners. In any case, the intention is to remain on the ground and to fulfill the UN’s humanitarian mandate.