While Britain announced it would work for a United Nations Security Council resolution on the conflict, which has been going on for more than 18 months, United Nations Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, has denounced reported attacks on civilians by Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on Friday.
The world’s largest relocation crisis began in mid-April 2023 when the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces engaged in a power battle ahead of a scheduled handover to civilian administration.
The RSF is mostly to blame for the waves of ethnically motivated violence that have resulted from the current conflict.
According to activists, the RSF massacred at least 124 people in a village in El Gezira State last month, making it one of the bloodiest occurrences of the conflict.
The army is allegedly arming citizens in Gezira, according to the RSF. In the past, the RSF has denied causing harm to civilians in Sudan and blamed renegade actors for the action.
“Reports of large numbers of civilians being killed, detained and displaced, acts of sexual violence against women and girls, the looting of homes and markets and the burning of farms,” a U.N. spokesperson said, horrifying Guterres.
“Such acts may constitute serious violations of international humanitarian law and human rights law. Perpetrators of such serious violations must be held accountable,” U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said.
According to Britain, which took over as the Security Council’s November presidency on Friday, the 15-member council will convene on Sudan on November 12 to talk about “scaling up aid delivery and ensuring greater protection of civilians by all sides.”
“We will be shortly introducing a draft Security Council resolution … to drive forward progress on this,” Britain’s U.N. Ambassador Barbara Woodward told a press conference.
She stated that the draft would concentrate on “developing a compliance mechanism for the warring parties commitments they made on the protection of civilians in Jeddah over a year ago in 2023 and ways to support mediation efforts to deliver a ceasefire, even if we start local ceasefires before moving to a national one.”
For a resolution to be enacted, it must have at least nine votes and not be vetoed by the United States, France, Britain, Russia, or China.
The action was taken because the U.N. and aid organisations’ three-month permission from Sudanese authorities to utilise the Adre border crossing with Chad to provide humanitarian aid to Darfur is about to expire in mid-November.
Sudan’s U.N. Ambassador Al-Harith Idriss Al-Harith Mohamed stated on Monday that the army-backed administration is dedicated to enabling humanitarian supplies throughout the nation, even in areas under RSF control.
Vassily Nebenzia, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, stated on Monday that it would be “inappropriate to put pressure on” the Sudanese administration to decide whether the Adre crossing would be open past mid-November.
“We’re categorically opposed to the politicization of humanitarian assistance,” he said. “We believe that any humanitarian assistance should be conducted and delivered solely with the central authorities in the loop.”
