The discovery of a mass grave containing 87 people in Sudan’s Darfur region is another atrocity in a brutal three-month conflict in the country and echoes the notorious horrors of Sudan’s recent past.
Just two years ago, after years of conflict, the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and decades of dictatorship, Sudan seemed a tentative success story. But since April, the conflict between the country’s military and the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces has essentially dashed Sudan’s hopes for a democratic future, sparked a humanitarian crisis and threatened fragile regional stability. A series of ceasefires have failed to stem the violence, which began as rival military leaders fought for control after toppling the civilian interim prime minister – offering little hope of an end to the brutality.
United Nations investigators on Thursday announced the existence of the mass grave on the eve of a mediation effort by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Sisi and other regional leaders have met in Cairo to prevent the conflict in Sudan from spreading and further destabilizing neighboring countries.
The bodies in the grave include members of a non-Arabic-speaking ethnic group called Masalit, according to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, as well as others who were allegedly killed by the RSF forces and allied militias in the area for eight days in June. The dead include seven women and seven children, as well as people who died because they were unable to seek medical treatment for injuries sustained in the violence.
“I condemn in the strongest terms the killing of civilians and auxiliaries, and I am also appalled at the callous and disrespectful way the dead, their families and communities were treated,” Volker Türk, High Commissioner for Human Rights, said in a statement on Thursday .
Elmurod Usubaliev/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
The mass grave in West Darfur is reminiscent of recent history. In 2003, the Sudanese government used militias known as the Janjaweed, which eventually became the RSF, to brutally put down an uprising by non-Arab people in the Darfur region. The Janjaweed also brutalized civilians, resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths and the displacement of more than two million people.
The conflict in Darfur officially ended in August 2020 with a peace deal between Darfur’s rebel groups and the interim government, but violence continued, militias attacked ethnic minorities and many thousands of people were still displaced.
Surrounding countries like Egypt and Ethiopia have a vested interest in preventing the conflict from spreading further and affecting their own countries – whether through escalation of violence or external displacement. But if past efforts are any indication, an end to violence will be fleeting and unsatisfactory.
The African Union and a coalition of countries including the US and Saudi Arabia have been trying in vain to broker peace between the two warring factions for the past three months. RSF and SAF officials traveled to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia on Saturday to resume talks after a series of deadly clashes in Bahri and Omdurman, Portal reported.
But with repeated ceasefire violations and efforts by both the RSF and SAF to derail Sudan’s transition to democracy, a lasting peace is hard to imagine. The current conflict arose out of the RSF’s desire to remain independent of the regular military, and both sides have so far proved unwilling to engage in substantive talks on a permanent ceasefire.
Furthermore, neither side seems interested in putting the country back on the path to democratic civilian rule that the Sudanese people have been demanding for years.
There are no signs of an end to the humanitarian crisis in Sudan
After widespread civilian protests and a military coup to overthrow dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019, former Prime Minister Abdallah Hamdok al-Kinani ably guided the country’s transition to civilian democratic rule.
However, the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan Abd-al-Rahman interfered in this process and sacked Hamdok in October 2021. Although Hamdok was briefly reinstated a month later, he officially resigned in January 2022, and al-Burhan has been the de facto head of state ever since.
The conflict between al-Burhan and RSF General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo or Hemedti erupted in widespread chaos and violence in the capital Khartoum in the early morning of April 15. Since then, several ceasefire attempts have been made to allow humanitarian aid and access, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration, around 2.8 million people have been displaced. Accurate information on the death toll in the conflict has been difficult to obtain, but could be as high as 3,000.
Fighting has spread from Khartoum, where it was initially concentrated, to the cities of North Khartoum, Omdurman and Bahri, and the Darfur region.
The humanitarian situation remains serious across the country; On Saturday, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Martin Griffiths condemned the violence and stressed the challenge of providing humanitarian assistance during conflicts.
“We cannot work under the barrel of a gun,” Griffiths said in a statement. “We cannot replenish stocks of food, water and medicines if the brazen looting of these supplies continues. We cannot deliver if our staff are prevented from reaching people in need.” Griffiths also estimated that 13 million children, or about half of the children remaining in Sudan, are in urgent need of humanitarian assistance.
But without a lasting truce, delivering that aid will be an enduring challenge, Griffiths wrote. “We need predictable commitments from the parties to the conflict that will enable us to safely deliver humanitarian assistance to people in need, wherever they are.”
The SAF and RSF signed the Jeddah Declaration of Commitment to Protect Sudan’s Civilians on May 11 this year, in which both sides pledged to “deliver on our core obligations under international humanitarian law and to facilitate humanitarian response to the needs of the civilian population.” Conflict.
International humanitarian law requires that “the dead be buried with honour”, preferably in individual graves and according to the religious rites of their society or group, and that the dead be clearly marked where circumstances call for a group burial.
The mass grave in Darfur appears to violate those standards, particularly given the evidence that civilians have been prevented from collecting and identifying their dead – let alone burying them in a manner consistent with both international humanitarian law and human rights law corresponds to local customs.
The grave’s existence is also an indicator of targeted violence against non-Arab ethnic groups and represents a brutal echo of the RSF’s beginnings as Janjaweed militias in 2003. The International Criminal Court, which indicted former dictator Bashir for crimes against humanity, war crimes and genocide for its involvement in the Darfur conflict, announced Thursday that it would re-investigate the killings in Darfur, as well as reports of mass rape and gender-based crimes, looting and crimes against children.
Several humanitarian groups also accused the RSF of holding more than 5,000 people – an estimated 3,500 of them civilians, including women and foreigners – in appalling conditions in Khartoum, Portal reported on Friday. The RSF rejected these allegations.
Also, airstrikes in urban areas like Khartoum and Omdurman were particularly destructive; A SAF attack on the RSF supply route through Omdurman on July 8 killed at least 22 people and wounded dozens more.
The conflict in Sudan threatens to further destabilize the entire region
Egypt’s attempt to mediate in the Sudan conflict has its roots in its own concerns about its domestic stability and economy, Gulf State Analytics’ Giorgio Cafiero wrote in Al Jazeera on Wednesday. Egypt is on the verge of defaulting on its debt, further damaging its credit rating. inflation is at an all-time high; And wealthy Gulf states, which have lent the country billions over the years, now seem uninterested in handing out more money with no guarantees that it will be used wisely.
Around 256,000 Sudanese refugees have fled to the north, but the Egyptian state and its social safety net lack the resources to adequately support them. Furthermore, as Cafiero notes, Sudan was previously a key trading partner of Egypt, supplying agricultural products such as beef in exchange for buying manufactured goods. Without these agricultural imports, food prices will continue to rise – never a good sign of Egypt’s stability.
Thousands of Sudanese refugees have also entered Ethiopia, itself a place of ethnic unrest and civil war. Although both Ethiopia and Sudan appeared to be on the road to more stable and democratic societies in 2019 under Ethiopian President Abiy Ahmed and the Sudanese Transitional Council, this stability was short-lived. Abiy and Ethiopian forces clashed with the ethnic Tigray region and its Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), sparking a brutal civil war in 2021.
The conflict in both countries raises the possibility of further disputes in the region, including over Al Fashaga, a lush agricultural area on Sudan’s eastern flank, and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), a huge hydroelectric dam that stretches some 30 kilometers from Ethiopia away is border with Sudan. A May report by the Economist Intelligence Unit pointed out that instability in Sudan may also fuel violence and humanitarian crises in neighboring Chad. Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees arrived in Chad before the conflict began in April, but large parts of the country are already suffering from food shortages due to crop failures and internal instability.
Neither party in the Sudan conflict has the impetus to back down, and appeals for the security of the country and its people have so far failed to actually stop the bloodshed.
Although Egypt and other regional actors have a vested interest in preventing violence from spreading to their own territories, they may not be able to stop what could soon lead to full-scale civil war.
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