The head of the Red Cross said yesterday that history is repeating itself in Sudan's Darfur region, following reports of mass killings during the fall of the town of El Fashir to the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) last week.
The capture of El Fashir, the Sudanese army's last stronghold in Darfur, marked a turning point in Sudan's civil war, giving paramilitary forces de facto control over more than a quarter of the country's territory.
Witnesses described how RSF fighters separated men from women and children, after which shots were heard. RSF denies harming civilians. The Global Hunger Monitoring Center confirmed yesterday that famine conditions prevailed in El Fashir.
The situation in Sudan is "terrible," International Committee of the Red Cross President Mirjana Spoljaric said in an interview with Reuters over the weekend.
She said tens of thousands of people fled El Fasher after RSF took the city, and that tens of thousands more were likely trapped there, without access to food, water or medical care. “History repeats itself, and it gets worse every time the other side takes over a city,” she said.
More than 200.000 people were killed in the Darfur genocide in the early 2000s, when the regime of Omar al-Bashir hired Arab Janjaweed militias to help suppress an uprising by non-Arab ethnic groups in what has been described as genocide. These militias later became the Rapid Support Forces.
The International Criminal Court's Office of the Prosecutor announced yesterday that it is gathering evidence of alleged mass killings, rapes and other crimes in El Fasher.
During his regular Sunday sermon in St. Peter's Square, Pope Leo appealed for an immediate ceasefire and the opening of humanitarian corridors in Sudan, saying that attacks on civilians and obstruction of humanitarian aid "are causing unacceptable suffering."
Sudan's ambassador to Egypt, Imadeldin Mustafa Adawy, accused RSF of war crimes in El Fasher. He said the Sudanese government would not negotiate with the paramilitary group and called on the international community to declare it a terrorist organization.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan also called on the Muslim world yesterday to end the violence in Sudan. "No one with a heart... can accept the recent massacres of civilians in El Fasher. We cannot remain silent," he told delegates at the Organization of Islamic Cooperation meeting in Istanbul.
When asked about her message to the alleged foreign sponsors of the conflicting parties, Špoljarić said: “Especially those states that have influence over the conflicting parties bear the responsibility to do everything necessary to restrain them and ensure the protection of the civilian population.”
The United Arab Emirates has been accused of sending significant military aid to the RSF, a charge the UAE denies. The opposing side, the Port Sudan-based authorities, have foreign allies, including Egypt, and last year used Iranian drones in an attempt to turn the tide of the conflict.
In an interview with the French newspaper Le Monde, some human rights activists, lawyers and journalists criticized the international community for its inaction on this issue.
“Western countries are issuing condemnation after condemnation, but they are not taking any action,” Holud Keir, a Sudanese analyst and founder of the Confluence Advisory think tank, told Le Monde.
"The tragedy in El Fasher is not a surprise. We have known for a long time that it could happen. By contenting themselves with issuing useless statements, Western countries bear a shared responsibility. They have shown guilt and indifference," added a Western diplomat who wished to remain anonymous.
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