The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, says the global human rights body is shocked at the wanton killings that have seen more than 200 people dead in the troubled Darfur region in Sudan.
Bachelet who expressed her disappointment in a statement on Wednesday, demanded an “impartial and independent” investigations into the attacks following fighting that erupted in the troubled region between members of the Massalit community and Arab fighters since Friday.
In the statement, the UN human rights chief she was “appalled” at the spike in the ethnic violence which has spread “in and around the West Darfur state capital El Geneina” and has worsened the situation in the “vast, arid and impoverished region long awash with guns.”
“I am appalled. I am in shock. I am concerned that this region continues to see repeated, serious incidents of intercommunal violence, with mass casualties,” she said
“The fighting, which comes as Sudan grapples with the fallout from a coup six months ago led by army chief Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, has seen hospitals attacked, a police station destroyed and a market burnt to the ground,” the UN reported.
An official death toll from the governor of West Darfur state, Khamees Abkar, showed that as at Wednesday, at least 213 people have been killed in three days of violence, with the clashes centred on Krink, a locality of about 500,000 people roughly 1,100 kilometres west of Sudan’s capital Khartoum.
Abkar called the destruction and death a “massive crime”, noting that 201 people were killed and 103 wounded on Sunday alone, in a video published late on Tuesday.
It is the latest in several rounds of recent intercommunal clashes, pitting the Massalit, an ethnic group of largely settled farmers, against semi-nomadic Arab pastoralist groups, heavy fighting initially erupted on Friday when at least eight people were killed in the Krink region, with gunmen attacking Massalit villages in retaliation for the killing of two comrades, the General Co-ordination for Refugees and Displaced in Darfur, an independent aid group, said.