Sudan: UN Security Council members will convene for closed consultations on 29 July 2024 at request of UK

THE Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General for Sudan Ramtane Lamamra convened delegations from the warring parties—the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—in Geneva between 11 and 19 July to hold discussions in “proximity format”, supported by a UN integrated technical team. He aimed to discuss issues relating to measures to ensure the distribution of humanitarian assistance and options for the protection of civilians across Sudan. Lamamra is expected to provide an update to UN Security Council members tomorrow (July 29) on the ongoing efforts aimed at resolving the Sudanese crisis. Read more in a report by What's In Blue copied in full here below. 

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Related reports

#US-led #Sudan #ceasefire talks in #Switzerland 14 Aug 2024 is Sudan's last chance to save itself and its people. The US is $35 trillion in debt. #ElonMusk posted at X yesterday: "America is headed for bankruptcy fyi".
Read more at: https://t.co/2bRxub7NZb#famine #Darfur… https://t.co/5r07zq8v1f

— SUDAN WATCH (@SudanWatchBlog) July 27, 2024

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From What's In Blue* at securitycouncilreport.org
Dated Sunday, 28 July 2024. Full copy:

Sudan: Closed Consultations

Tomorrow morning (29 July), Security Council members will convene for closed consultations on Sudan, at the request of the UK (the penholder on the file). The anticipated briefers are Personal Envoy of the Secretary-General for Sudan Ramtane Lamamra and OCHA’s Director of the Financing and Partnerships Division Lisa Doughten. Council members may consider issuing press elements following tomorrow’s meeting.

Lamamra is expected to provide an update on the ongoing efforts aimed at resolving the Sudanese crisis. The Personal Envoy convened delegations from the warring parties—the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF)—in Geneva between 11 and 19 July to hold discussions in “proximity format”, supported by a UN integrated technical team. He aimed to discuss issues relating to measures to ensure the distribution of humanitarian assistance and options for the protection of civilians across Sudan. In a press release issued at the end of the discussions, Lamamra said that his team held around 20 sessions with the parties’ delegations, including technical and plenary meetings, in the context of their respective mandates. He noted that, during these engagements, the delegations expressed their positions on key issues of concern, thereby deepening mutual understanding. Lamamra described the discussions as an “encouraging initial step in a longer and complex process” and welcomed the commitments announced by “one of the two parties” to enhance humanitarian assistance and the protection of civilians.

At the end of proximity talks, the RSF reportedly sent a letter to the UN Secretary-General, outlining commitments it has made, including to facilitate humanitarian aid deliveries in coordination with the RSF-affiliated Sudanese Agency for Relief and Humanitarian Operations (SARHO), to strengthen civilian protection measures, and to facilitate the safe passage of individuals and supplies. Media reports quoted Salwa Adam Benya, Sudan’s Humanitarian Aid Commissioner and the head of the SAF delegation, as saying in a statement that the proximity talks offered a “promising foundation” for addressing the humanitarian crisis in the country and expressed Sudan’s commitment to cooperate with the UN “within existing national humanitarian policies”. Regarding the protection of civilians issue, however, she stressed the importance of implementing the “Declaration of Commitment to Protect the Civilians of Sudan”, signed by the warring parties on 11 May 2023.

Tomorrow, Lamamra is also expected to brief members on the second consultative meeting on enhancing coordination among the various peace initiatives on Sudan, hosted by Djibouti on 24 July. Several regional and international interlocutors attended the meeting, including Lamamra, the African Union (AU), the European Union (EU), the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), and the League of Arab States (LAS), as well as representatives from Bahrain, Egypt, Mauritania, the US, and Saudi Arabia. The first consultative meeting was convened by the LAS in Cairo on 12 June. (For background and more information, see our 17 June What’s in Blue story.)

The Special Envoy is also likely to expand on the details of the Mediators Planning Retreat on Sudan hosted by Djibouti on 25 and 26 July, which was initially proposed by Lamamra. The meeting brought together representatives from 32 regional and international stakeholders, including the Security Council’s permanent members (P5) and its African members (Algeria, Mozambique, and Sierra Leone), Sudan’s neighbouring countries, several Gulf countries, as well as the AU, the EU, IGAD, the LAS, and the UN. A press release issued following the meeting, among other matters, stressed the importance of integrating lessons learned to inform decision-making processes and strengthening coordination and adapting strategies to respond to dynamic realities on the ground, based on:

• support for all current and future efforts to sustain high-level peace engagements;
• a commitment to cooperate on initiatives aimed at restoring peace and stability in the country and the region; and
• shared and differentiated responsibilities of existing multilateral coordination mechanisms and the recognition of their continued role and comparative advantages.

At tomorrow’s meeting, Lamamra and some members might also refer to the recent US statement inviting the Sudanese warring parties to participate in ceasefire talks to begin on 14 August in Switzerland, co-hosted by Saudi Arabia. The statement notes that the talks will include the AU, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the UN as observers. The talks aim to reach an agreement on a nationwide cessation of violence and to develop a robust monitoring and verification mechanism to ensure implementation of any agreement. The US-Saudi facilitated talks in Jeddah were indefinitely suspended after two rounds of discussions, the last of which was held in November 2023 with the participation of a joint representative of the AU and IGAD, due to the failure of the warring parties to implement their commitments. (For background, see the Sudan brief in our June 2023 Monthly Forecast and 15 November 2023 What’s in Blue story.)

Council members might also reiterate some of the points contained in their 12 July press statement, including welcoming Lamamra’s convening of the Geneva proximity talks. Some members might be interested in hearing the Personal Envoy’s assessment of the Sudanese parties’ positions and the prospects for de-escalation and further dialogue. They may also wish to learn more details about Lamamra’s engagements with key regional and international interlocutors as part of the recent mediation talks and his efforts to coordinate the different peace initiatives, as well as have a frank exchange on the way forward. Some members may also be interested in hearing his assessment of the parties’ commitments and the potential for them to be translated into concrete actions on the ground.

Doughten is expected to provide an update on the humanitarian situation in the country in light of evolving security developments. According to a 4 July OCHA flash update, the escalation of fighting in south-western Sennar state in late June has displaced more than 136,000 people, many of whom might be experiencing secondary or tertiary displacement. In a 19 July press briefing, Deputy Spokesperson for the Secretary-General Farhan Haq said that fighting in Sennar has severely affected the operations of the World Food Programme (WFP) across the region, including in White Nile, Blue Nile, Kassala, and Gedaref states. He reported that the hostilities have cut off key supply routes for food and fuel into Sennar. In addition, Haq noted that the route from Port Sudan to the city of Kosti through Sennar has been blocked, cutting off vital aid to hundreds of thousands of people, including many at risk of famine in the Kordofans and Darfur.

Doughten and several members are also expected to reiterate concerns about the dire food insecurity situation in the country. According to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report on Sudan, released on 27 June, 25.6 million people across Sudan are expected to face acute levels of food insecurity—described by the IPC as crisis level conditions or worse (IPC Phase 3 or above)—between June and September. Of this total, 755,000 people are expected to face catastrophic conditions (IPC Phase 5) in ten states, including Greater Darfur, South and North Kordofan, Blue Nile, Al Jazirah, and Khartoum. During this period, 14 areas in nine states are expected to face a risk of famine, according to the report.

Doughten is also likely to stress the importance of ensuring full and rapid humanitarian access through all modalities—including cross-line (across conflict lines within Sudan) and cross-border (across Sudan’s borders with some of the neighbouring countries), particularly in light of the disruptions caused by heavy rains and floods in some areas. A 23 July OCHA press release said that the Tine border crossing at the Chad-Sudan border—used by UN agencies and partners to conduct humanitarian operations—as well as many other routes in the southern part of Sudan remain inaccessible to due to flooding.

Tags: Insights on Africa, Sudan (Darfur)

View original: https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/whatsinblue/2024/07/sudan-closed-consultations-3.php

*About What's In Blue

When the Security Council approaches the final stage of negotiating a draft resolution, the text is printed in blue. What's In Blue is a series of insights on evolving Security Council actions designed to help interested UN readers keep up with what might soon be "in blue".

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Why our world today is uncannily - and worryingly - like the one Jesus was born into 2,023 years ago

From The Mail Online

Written by NIALL FERGUSON 

Niall Ferguson is Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford, a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics, and columnist with Bloomberg Opinion

Dated: Saturday, 23 December 2023, 01:43 - here is a copy in full:

Why our world today is uncannily - and worryingly - like the one Jesus was born into 2,023 years ago

The story of Jesus's birth is rarely told with much 

attention to its historical context 

It happened during the reign of the first Roman emperor. A child was born in an obscure farm building in a Middle Eastern province of the empire. 

All kinds of strange events occurred around the time of His birth, including a massacre of children, ordered by the Judean King Herod.

Along with some bewildered shepherds, three foreign 'magi' (wise men) found their way to the child's birthplace. But no one in the imperial capital Rome paid much attention.

This proved to be a mistake, as the birth of this child would ultimately transform the empire — and the world — for ever.

The story of Jesus's birth is rarely told with much attention to its historical context. But this year the circumstances of the time seem uncannily relevant. The Middle East is in just the kind of turmoil that had led the Romans to impose their imperial rule on Judaea.

And the United States is in just the kind of political crisis that led the Roman republic to become an empire under Augustus Caesar. In other surprising ways, too, what we are living through is similar to what the people of the early first century experienced.

Like our ancestors two millennia ago, we inhabit a distressing spiritual vacuum marked by pleasure seeking and unbridled consumerism. 

Christianity, the old religion, has become hollow to us, even as we go through the motions of recollecting the story of Christ's birth.

Let's begin with the war in the Middle East, which I believe will ultimately lead the United States to send troops back into the region, despite the painful memories of the 2003 Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation — which, in truth, are painful only for the families of the relatively small number of U.S. service personnel who were killed (3,519) or wounded (32,000) there. God bless them and their British counterparts this Christmas.

Most of us have strongly held but casually informed political opinions on the Middle East. On one side, supporters of Israel — not all of them Jews — regard it as obvious that Israel has a right to defend itself after the horrendous atrocities perpetrated against Israeli civilians by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) on October 7.

Supporters of the Palestinians, some of whom shamelessly celebrated those atrocities, insist that the Palestinian resistance is justified because of the wretched conditions in Gaza and the lack of Israeli commitment to a viable Palestinian state. Arguments about the issue will ruin many a family Christmas this year.

However, this debate about whose cause is more just — the Israelis' or the Palestinians' — misses the point. 

The reality is that, in the 50 years since the last surprise attack on Israel on the Holy Day of Yom Kippur (October 6, 1973), it has proved impossible for Israel to find a peaceful modus vivendi with the Palestinians.

Israel made peace with Egypt at Camp David in 1978. It made peace with Jordan in 1994. It signed the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1995. 

And, under the Abraham Accords of 2020-21, Israel normalised its relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco.

Indeed, it was about to reach a similar rapprochement with Saudi Arabia when the slaughter of the innocents happened on October 7, freezing if not killing the negotiations.

The United States is in just the kind of political crisis that led the Roman republic to become an empire under Augustus Caesar

There are two obvious reasons why peace with the Palestinians has proved elusive. First, the Palestinian Authority established under the Oslo Accords has proved to be an oxymoron — it lacks any kind of authority.

Second, many Palestinians themselves have preferred the path of violence, turning to Hamas and other terrorist groups for leadership, apparently oblivious to Hamas's true character as a criminal racket. 

While ordinary Gazans bear the brunt of Israel's war of retaliation, the Hamas mafiosi live in luxury in Qatar on the money sent to Gaza by naive international donors.

But there is a third explanation for the agony of the Holy Land, and that is geopolitical. The Abraham Accords were one of the diplomatic triumphs of Donald Trump's administration. 

Yet Joe Biden decided to change course, opting to try to revive the obviously dead Iran nuclear deal, the 'Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action' of 2015.

That deal was President Barack Obama's attempt to induce the Islamic Republic of Iran to suspend — not to end — its nuclear weapons program in return for relief from U. S. sanctions.

It did nothing to prevent Iran using the money it received under the deal to finance terrorist organisations throughout the region, including not only Hamas and PIJ, but also Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen.

That was why Trump abandoned the nuclear deal and re-imposed sanctions on Iran. It was why in 2020 he killed one of Iran's principal malefactors, Qasem Soleimani, the commander of the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The present crisis in the Middle East is, therefore, the result of a combination of Iranian aggression and American pusillanimity.

Consider the passivity with which Washington has reacted to a succession of Houthi attacks on U.S. bases in the region and, most recently, merchant shipping in the Red Sea. 

Why send two aircraft-carrier strike groups to the region if you have no intention of using them for fear of 'escalating' the crisis?

However, the haplessness of the Biden administration's foreign policy is not the main reason why Trump is now narrowly the favourite to be the next president of the United States, though the perception that Biden is drifting into new 'forever wars' is playing its part.

The probability of Trump's re-election on November 5 next year is now, in my view, above 50 per cent. The prediction market agrees. So do most recent polls.

Despite his sea of legal troubles — and perhaps partly because of them — the former president is the clear frontrunner to be the Republican nominee, about 50 points ahead of Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis. 

And Trump is well placed to defeat Biden in a rerun of the 2020 contest, especially if you look at his polling leads in key swing states.

The crucial issue is not Biden's foreign policy flops. Nor is it his advanced age, though even a majority of Democratic voters admit that, at 81, he is too old to be president. The key issue is 'Bidenomics,' a term devised by the dotard president's handlers.

Trump is well placed to defeat Biden in a rerun of the 2020 contest, 

especially if you look at his polling leads in key swing states

Objectively, by most conventional measures, the U.S. economy is in good shape — certainly in better shape than Britain's or Europe's. Unemployment is low (3.7 per cent). Inflation has come down substantially (to 3.1 per cent, compared with a peak of 9.1 per cent in June last year). The financial markets are rooting for interest-rate cuts next year. 

But voters have still not forgiven the administration for the inflation they suffered last year. They also sense that a slowdown is coming, if not a recession — the inevitable result of the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes.

As a consequence, Biden's polling on this key issue is terrible: on average, nearly 61 per cent of voters disapprove of his handling of the economy, and 65 per cent his handling of inflation. An even higher proportion (69 per cent) think the country is 'on the wrong track'.

Though he has not sunk as low as Jimmy Carter in 1979, Biden's position is uncomfortably similar to that of Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush at the same stages in their only presidential terms.

I do not entirely blame my fellow Americans for considering re-electing Trump. His first term was much better for the average U.S. household — who saw their real income surge 9 per cent before Covid struck, after 17 years of stagnation — than most elite media coverage would have you believe.

However, in view of all that has emerged about Trump's unconscionably reckless conduct between election night 2020 and the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, I fear that his return to the White House could mark the beginning of the end of the American republic and the first step towards an unconstitutional American empire.

And I worry that Trump will be able to justify overriding the constitution by pointing to both domestic and international emergencies.

At home, there will inevitably be 'mainly peaceful' (i.e. partly violent) protests in Democratic strongholds if Trump is declared the election winner.

Abroad, Trump will inherit a triple global crisis in Ukraine, Israel and potentially also Taiwan. Even if China's President Xi Jinping does not risk blockading the island he covets, it would not surprise me if Hezbollah opened a new front against Israel in the New Year.

Consider how the Roman republic died as the ruthless political operator Octavian — Julius Caesar's adopted son — asserted his power.

He became emperor by steps: first as one of the second triumvirate — an alliance between three rival statesmen, Octavian, Mark Antony and Lepidus, giving them absolute power; then as lifetime commander-in-chief (imperator), tribune and censor; and finally as 'princeps civitatis' (First Citizen) with the title 'Augustus'.

What made the Roman Empire possible — indeed, necessary — was the need to end a state of recurrent civil war at home and of geopolitical crisis abroad, especially in the Middle East, but also in central Europe — Rome's Ukraine was Germania — and even in unruly Britannia, conquered by the Romans after AD 43.

Augustus won power by ousting Lepidus and then defeating Mark Antony and his lover Queen Cleopatra and invading Egypt, which he subsequently annexed. It was Augustus, too, who incorporated Judaea, including Herod's kingdom, into the Empire. It was a Roman census that required Joseph and the pregnant Mary to travel from Nazareth to Bethlehem.

And this brings me to the other major resemblance between our time and the time of Jesus's birth 2,023 years ago.

One reason why Donald Trump's return to power is now a possibility is that we in the West inhabit a moral and ethical wasteland. If we were still a truly Christian civilisation, Trump would stand no chance of becoming president again.

A people who were committed to the teachings of the Old and New Testaments would have no hesitation in identifying him as a serial violator of at least half the Ten Commandments and, therefore, morally unqualified to occupy the highest office in the republic.

Yet the U.S. today is only nominally a Christian country, in the sense that a majority of Americans still identify as Christians of one denomination or another.

According to survey data, both faith and observance have significantly declined in the 20 years since I have lived and worked there. In the 1990s, 90 per cent of Americans identified as Christians. It's now down to two-thirds. Weekly church attendance has also slumped.

In this respect, the U.S. is beginning to resemble England, where less than half the population (46.2 per cent) now say they are Christians. More than a third (37.2 per cent) say they have no religion, according to the 2021 census.

Like the people of the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago, we are almost entirely consumed by the pleasures and preoccupations of this world. One of many symptoms of our spiritual bankruptcy is the epidemic of mental ill-health sweeping the English-speaking world.

Dark days may lie ahead. It is some comfort, surely, that a saviour could be born at such a time

Another symptom is the slump in fertility rates as more and more couples opt to have just one child or no children at all.

Whatever people may say when they rationalise this decision to limit their reproduction below the replacement rate (to sustain the species), in truth the decision to restrict or forgo parenthood is an implicit expression of despair.

For there is no greater joy to be had in this world than that of bringing a baby into it. It is, I would argue, the ultimate affirmation of faith. Yes, we know that every child is doomed, as are we, to experience suffering and, inevitably, death.

And yet we know that the delights of life are worth all its trials and its inevitable end. A Christian knows that we humans are more than mere naked apes. We know that God made us 'in His image'.

It is, thus, no accident that at the heart of the Christian faith is the Nativity. The greatest story ever told begins with the birth of a baby boy, immaculately and divinely conceived, to a young Jewish woman. 

And the story ends, not with His cruel crucifixion in Jerusalem, but with the conquest of the Roman Empire itself by the religion founded by Him — Christos, the Anointed One of the Lord God.

This Christmas, let us remind ourselves that His 2,000-year reign over the faithful began not only amid a Middle Eastern crisis, but also in the period of transition from republic to empire.

Dark days may lie ahead. It is some comfort, surely, that a saviour could be born at such a time.

View original: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12895595/world-today-uncannily-one-Jesus-born.html#comments

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Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, said to be Jesus's birthplace  

Mail writer Richard Pendlebury pictured inside 

the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, said to be Jesus's birthplace 

Source: How Bethlehem became the backdrop to violence and fear as war comes to the West Bank, Richard Pendlebury report

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