SUDAN WATCH: UNHRC

Showing posts with label UNHRC. Show all posts

Friday, January 05, 2024

Thousands fled Sudan to safety in S. Sudan, scenes at Joda border chaotic with arrivals from Madani, Sudan

As we enter #Christmas weekend yet again thousands are fleeing #SudanConflict to seek safety in 🇸🇸
The scenes at Joda border are chaotic with arrivals from #Madani
Humanitarian partners again working against & around the clock
Only solution: the fighting must stop now pic.twitter.com/0ECKUIdvef
— Marie-Helene Verney (@MarieHVerney) December 22, 2023

ENDS

Saturday, November 11, 2023

UK has a key role to play in fighting for peace in Sudan

RIGHT NOW IN SUDAN, over five million people have been displaced and many thousands killed. Twenty-four million people – half the population – need humanitarian assistance, 15 million suffer from acute food insecurity and 19 million children are out of school. Recent analysis has shown that at least 68 villages in Darfur have been burnt to the ground by armed militia in the past few months. The UK's APPG hopes that more can be done to stop the flow of arms to warring parties by putting greater pressure on their regional backers, enforcing the existing UN arms embargo on Darfur and extending it to the entire country. Read more in the following article.

From Politics Home, UK

By Vicky Ford MP @vickyford

Dated Thursday, 9 November 2023 - here is a copy in full:

The UK has a key role to play in fighting for peace in Sudan

Wreckage in Khartoum (Credit: Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo)

October marked six months since the beginning of the war in Sudan and two years since the military coup that first dashed hopes of Sudan’s swift road to democracy. There is no clear winner and no end in sight.

Over five million people have been displaced and many thousands killed. Twenty-four million people – half the population – need humanitarian assistance, 15 million suffer from acute food insecurity and 19 million children are out of school. Of the $2.6bn required for humanitarian assistance, only $859m is available.

Members of the [UK Govt] All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Sudan and South Sudan met with Liela Musa Medani, a Sudanese woman who has previously lived in the United Kingdom for over 20 years. She escaped from Khartoum in July but remains in touch with family members. Of the 50 households that used to live in her street, only four remain.

For the past six months, they have faced killings and artillery shelling every single day. There is no food, and anyone who tries to transport food risks their life. There is no electricity, no water, no medicine and no humanitarian aid. The few people left in that once mighty city cannot leave. School buildings are now cemeteries. Girls have learned to disfigure themselves to try to avoid being raped.

Ethnic cleansing has returned to Darfur. Twenty years ago, during the genocide, between 300,000 and 400,000 people were killed, either directly in the conflict or indirectly. Recent analysis has shown that at least 68 villages in Darfur have been burnt to the ground by armed militia in the past few months.

Since the war began, many of those forced to leave their homes have fled towards Chad and South Sudan. Over 320,000 Sudanese have crossed the border into Egypt, while many others are still stranded at the borders.

The UK has a key role to play due to our close historical relations with Sudan, the trust many Sudanese people still place in us and our role as a penholder in the United Nations Security Council. The significant Sudanese diaspora community in the UK includes NHS doctors.

The UK has sanctioned some of the financial networks of the warring parties, sponsored a resolution at the UN Human Rights Council establishing an independent Commission of Enquiry to investigate alleged human rights violations and provided diplomatic and practical support to help pro-democracy civilians cohere around a common platform.

The UK should continue to press for an immediate ceasefire to facilitate humanitarian access, scale up life-saving support and support better co-ordination between different regional and international mediation initiatives.

The APPG hopes that more can be done to stop the flow of arms to warring parties by putting greater pressure on their regional backers, enforcing the existing UN arms embargo on Darfur and extending it to the entire country. Targeted sanctions should also be extended to old regime loyalists who are calling for the continuation of the war.

There are two potentially encouraging developments. The Jeddah talks, suspended since June, have resumed and Sudanese civilian leaders have met in Addis Ababa aiming to build a united Democratic Civilian Front to end the war, deliver vital humanitarian assistance and secure a path to democratic government. This may create momentum for further unification of democratic civilian voices. Nevertheless, the prospects for ending the war remain very uncertain.

It is in the UK’s strategic interest to try to prevent the spread of terrorism, increased migration and the destabilisation of the wider region. Therefore it remains important that the UK continues to play an active diplomatic role and try to find a path to peace.

Vicky Ford, Conservative MP for Chelmsford, former minister for Africa and chair of the APPG for Sudan and South Sudan

View original: https://www.politicshome.com/thehouse/article/uk-key-role-play-fighting-peace-sudan

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Thursday, August 24, 2023

UK is sending Darfur Sudan war crimes evidence to UN Security Council, UN Human Rights Council & ICC

UK is penholder on Sudan file at UN Security Council. The ICC launched a new investigation into alleged war crimes in Sudan in July with ICC chief prosecutor Karim Khan saying “we are in the midst of a human catastrophe”.

Thursday, July 13, 2023

UN blames Sudan's RSF over 'mass grave' in Darfur

Report at Reuters.com
By Emma Farge and Khalid Abdelaziz
Published Thursday 13 July 2023; 3:58 PM GMT+1 - here is a full copy:

At least 87 buried in Sudan mass grave, including women, children, UN says

Summary

- Victims buried in shallow grave near El Geneina

- Paramilitary force RSF denies any involvement

- Women and children among the dead, UN says

- Darfur violence recalls 'Janjaweed' killings of 2000s

GENEVA, July 13 (Reuters) - The U.N. human rights office said on Thursday at least 87 people including women and children had been buried in a mass grave in Sudan's West Darfur, saying it had credible information they were killed by the country's Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

RSF officials denied any involvement, saying the paramilitary group was not a party to the conflict in West Darfur.

Ethnically motivated bloodshed has escalated in recent weeks in step with fighting between rival military factions that erupted in April and has brought the country to the brink of civil war. In El Geneina, witnesses and rights groups have reported waves of attacks by the RSF and Arab militias against the non-Arab Masalit people, including shootings at close range.

"According to credible information gathered by the Office, those buried in the mass grave were killed by RSF and their allied militia around 13-21 June...," the U.N. statement said.

Local people were forced to dispose of the bodies including those of women and children in the shallow grave in an open area near the city between June 20-21, it added. Some of the people had died from untreated injuries, it said.

"I condemn in the strongest terms the killing of civilians and hors de combat individuals, and I am further appalled by the callous and disrespectful way the dead, along with their families and communities, were treated," said U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Volker Turk in the same statement, calling for an investigation.

Sudanese people, who fled the violence in their country and newly arrived, wait to be registered at the camp near the border between Sudan and Chad in Adre, Chad April 26, 2023. REUTERS/Mahamat Ramadane/File Photo

An RSF senior official who declined to be identified said it "completely denies any connection to the events in West Darfur as we are not party to it, and we did not get involved in a conflict as the conflict is a tribal one."

Another RSF source said it was being accused due to political motivations from the Masalit and others. He reiterated that the group was ready to participate in an investigation and to hand over any of its forces found to have broken the law.

It was not possible to determine exactly what portion of the dead were Masalits, a U.N. spokesperson added.

The ethnic killings have raised fears of a repeat of the atrocities perpetuated in Darfur after 2003, when "Janjaweed" militias from which the RSF was formed helped the government crush a rebellion by mainly non-Arab groups in Darfur, killing some [SW Ed: allegedly] 300,000 people. Sudanese civilians have fled the area on foot, some having been killed or shot as they escaped.

"This report is a good first step, but more efforts are needed to uncover more violations," said Ibrahim, a refugee in neighbouring Chad, who asked to withhold his last name for fear of retribution.

Army spokesperson Brigadier General Nabil Abdullah told Reuters the incident "rises to the level of war crimes and these kinds of crimes should not pass without accountability."

"This rebel militia is not against the army but against the Sudanese citizen, and its project is a racist project and a project of ethnic cleansing," he said.

Play Video: Report from Khartoum, Sudan

(Reporting by Emma Farge in Geneva and Khalid Abdelaziz in Dubai; Additional reporting by Nafisa Eltahir in Cairo; Editing by Rachel More and William Maclean)

View original and video: https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/least-87-buried-mass-grave-sudans-west-darfur-un-2023-07-13

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Sunday, May 21, 2023

60,000 Sudanese have crossed into Chad. As villages in Darfur empty, villages in eastern Chad are filling up

NOTE from Sudan Watch Ed: Beige highlight is mine for future reference and to show: a woman with 5 children fled from Sudan to Chad in March; a Chadian official allegedly said Darfur war is just starting; ninety percent of the displaced seem to be children and women; they use westerners' lingo.

At height of Darfur war, usually before rainy season when rebels regrouped and splintered (I stopped counting after 40 groups, identifying them was like trying to nail mercury to a wall) women and children fled to be cared for by humanitarian aid. Rebels looted aid trucks to get the supplies they needed.

Going by what I can gather, people from all walks of life knew weeks before April 15 that fighting would start that week. What were the diplomats and politicians in Sudan doing? It's hard to believe there were no intelligence warnings. The fight for Khartoum was lightning fast and well orchestrated.

The US embassy in Khartoum alone has 70 staff. People acted surprised. It seems what we're being told doesn't add up. I saw a report about Egyptian soldiers on exercises in Sudan being caught April 13 and Burhan and Hemeti falling out over it. I saw it on video which is why I don't have report to hand.

Also during the fast-moving news at that time I glimpsed news of possible war between Sudan and Ethiopia. I've not had time to reprint those reports here for posterity nor much about Bashir & Co being sprung from prison.

The well-planned fight for Khartoum that erupted April 15 seemed different to previous chaotic coups and rebellions. If, as is reported, Sudan has no functioning government why hasn't a state of emergency been declared?

It's easy to remember how much Russia needs and appreciates Sudan's gold in order to keep up its war on Ukraine. And that Hemeti agreed to Russia leasing a port in Port Sudan where China has a port too.

What's China's stance, I wonder. A report HERE recently suggests it's standing back. Next post: Xi sends congratulations to Arab League meeting.

___________________________

Report from The New York Times

By Elian Peltier - Photographs by Yagazie Emezi

Elian Peltier and Yagazie Emezi visited refugee sites on Chad’s Sudan border, where tens of thousands of people have found refuge since a war started in Sudan last month.

Dated Tuesday 16 May 2023, 3:29 p.m. ET - full copy:

Fleeing Generals at War and Violent Militias, Many Say 'We're Not Coming Back'

The war in Sudan has unleashed a new wave of violence in the western region of Darfur, sending tens of thousands into neighbouring Chad, where a new humanitarian crisis is looming.

An estimated 60,000 Sudanese refugees have crossed into neighbouring Chad since the beginning of the war in Sudan in April. More than 90 percent of them are children and women.

Thousands of Sudanese refugees watched as the first emergency aid workers reached a village in Chad, days after escaping from their embattled country. Mothers tended to toddlers, while men listed their most urgent needs — water, vaccines, tarps for the looming rainy season.

The fighting that erupted in Sudan’s capital last month has ricocheted far beyond the city’s borders, worsening instability in the restive western region of Darfur and sending tens of thousands of people fleeing to neighboring countries, including Chad in Central Africa.

As villages in western Sudan empty, villages in eastern Chad are filling up: Camps have sprouted up, sometimes in days, with thousands of tents made of colourful sheets mounted on branches, forming a fragile patchwork of uncertainty.

IMAGE by The New York Times, map of Darfur Region, Sudan

The surging conflict in Darfur is the latest ordeal for a region that has been traumatized by two decades of [SW Ed: alleged] genocidal violence. It has also deepened a humanitarian crisis in Chad, where hundreds of thousands of people displaced from Darfur had already taken refuge.

The United Nations’ Refugee Agency said last week that 60,000 Sudanese had crossed into Chad since the start of the conflict — doubling an earlier assessment, with 25,000 refugees recently registered in the Chadian village of Borota alone. Most had fled Kango Haraza, a village on the other side of the border, in Darfur.

Aid workers from the United Nations’ Refugee Agency registering families in the Chadian village of Borota, a few miles from the Sudanese border.

Two New York Times journalists accompanied the U.N. agency last week into Borota, where tens of thousands of refugees have been without food, water and other essential items.

With Sudan’s most powerful groups, the army and the R.S.F., fighting for control in the capital, Khartoum, the unstable situation in Darfur has spiralled into further violence.

Militias, made up mostly of Arab fighters, have exploited the power vacuum to rampage through cities, loot households and kill an unknown number of civilians, according to aid workers, doctors and local activists. In response, some civilians have begun arming themselves, and non-Arab groups have also retaliated against militias at a small scale.

Along with Khartoum and the two adjoining cities across the Nile, cities in Darfur have been the most affected by the fighting between the Sudanese Army and a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces. Hospitals have been looted and markets burned.

But while Khartoum had been a peaceful city before April, Darfur has been torn by decades of violence.

More than 300,000 people were killed in Darfur in the 2000s when Sudan’s former dictator, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, ordered militias, widely known as the Janjaweed, to crush a rebellion among non-Arab groups. A popular uprising in 2019 led to Mr. al-Bashir’s ouster, but in Darfur the situation has continued to deteriorate, including with ethnically motivated attacks in recent years.

The latest influx of refugees is also increasing pressure on Chad, a landlocked, vast Central African country that shares 870 miles of border with Sudan and is the among the world’s poorest nations. Its eastern region, semiarid and isolated, already has more than 400,000 refugees from Darfur living in 13 camps, which are now filling with new arrivals helped by the U.N. refugee agency.

In Borota, thousands Sudanese refugees have joined people who had been displaced by earlier conflicts in Darfur.

About 90 percent of the refugees from Darfur recently registered by the United Nations in Chad are women and children. For most families, returning to Sudan is out of the question.

“Move back to what, and where?” said Khadija Abubakar, a mother of five young children who said she fled from Kango Haraza with her husband this month. “As long as there’s no security, we’re staying.”

The violence in Darfur shows no sign of abating. In El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur and 15 miles from Chad, armed groups have looted health care facilities and burned refugee camps. Hospitals are out of service, and humanitarian workers have fled the city for Chad, leaving thousands of people in need and trapped amid the fighting.

Over the past few days, at least 280 people were killed in El Geneina alone, according to the Sudanese Doctors’ Trade Union. Aid workers and Chadian officials now expect that a pause in the fighting there could push tens of thousands to flee to Chad.

In Borota, which is four miles from the Sudanese border, many refugees had fled earlier eruptions of violence in Darfur, according to Jean-Paul Habamungu, the coordinator of the U.N. agency’s operations in Eastern Chad.

He was one of the first humanitarian workers to reach Borota, arriving on May 11. What he saw stunned him: hundreds of children, most of whom had arrived in the previous days, lining up in front of him, so many people that it caught the local authorities and aid agencies by surprise.

Awa Ibrahim Abakar, 35, a refugee from Darfur now staying in Chad, said gunmen killed her husband and wounded one of her four children.

The refugee encampment is at least four hours away from the closest aid outpost in the region, and some parts of the sandy and bumpy tracks used to traverse the area will soon be submerged in the rainy season. As we crossed a few dried-out wadis, or rivers, on our way to Borota, raindrops appeared and puddles began to form.

Ms. Abubakar, the mother of five, has spent her days waiting for her husband to find food in a nearby village. As she tried to keep two toddlers playing in the dust nearby, she said that she also needed water and soap.

Other Sudanese repeated similar pleas. “We need vaccination for the children, we need tarp for when the rain comes,” said Adoum Ahmad Issa, a 43-year-old father of four who said he had arrived in Chad in early May.

In nearby tents, children in rags dozed on their mother’s laps, while other parents prepared madeeda hilba, a thick porridge, and grilled small grasshoppers in the 100-degree heat. Most appeared to have fled with little more than a few cooking supplies, sheets and mats and, in some cases, a donkey.

Mr. Issa and nearly two dozens other refugees interviewed this month said the violence in Darfur had preceded the fighting in Khartoum. But many said the new conflict had only made things worse.

It is unclear how many people have died in Darfur, but they are estimated to be in the hundreds. At least 822 civilians have been killed and more than 3,200 injured in the month long conflict, according to the doctors union.

At the border between Koufroune in Chad, and the Sudanese village of Tendelti, people journey back and forth to gather personal belongings.

Aid agencies have rushed to try to help refugees who have gathered in Chad, often in sites miles apart. In some areas, like in the Chadian border village of Koufroune, refugees have managed to bring furniture, mattresses and bed frames.

On a recent morning, some men and teenagers on horse-drawn carts crossed a dried riverbed — the border between the two countries — journeying back and forth between Koufroune and the Sudanese village of Tendelti, just on the other side. Some villagers said they fled under gunfire in the early days of the conflict. Tendelti now stands emptied of most residents.

A few Chadian soldiers stood guard by the riverbed, under the shade of mango trees bending under the weight of ripe fruit.

“Tendelti is now here, in Chad,” said Fatima Douldoum, a 50-year-old mother of five who said she fled in late March. Relatives crossed back in April to retrieve their beds.

“Tendelti is now here, in Chad,” Fatima Douldoum, left, a 50-year-old mother of five, said referring to her village in Darfur. She sat with her family under a tent made of scarves and other fabric.

“It is the first time so many people are bringing everything they can,” said Aleksandra Roulet-Cimpric, the country director for the International Rescue Committee, an aid organization providing health services in Koufroune. “It’s also the first time so many of them say ‘We’re not coming back.’”

Kango Haraza, too, is now mostly empty, and in recent days people have reached Borota from other Sudanese communities, said Mr. Habamungu of the U.N. agency.

As he visited the site last week, Mr. Habamungu said a Chadian official told him that the war in Darfur was only starting. “That made me pause and wonder,” Mr. Habamungu said. “How we are going to cope?”

A family from Darfur organized their belongings under a tree in Koufroune, Chad. Aid agencies have struggled to provide aid to the swelling number of Sudanese refugees arriving in Chad.

Violence in Sudan

Fighting between two military factions has thrown Sudan into chaos, with plans for a transition to a civilian-led democracy now in shambles.

A Rescue Operation: As feuding generals turned Karthoum into a war zone, two university students navigated a battered Toyota through the chaos and saved at least 60 desperate people.
Fleeing Sudan: The violence has driven thousands of Sudanese into neighboring countries and caused an exodus of diplomats and other foreigners who were in Sudan when violence erupted.
A Safe Haven, for Now: Egypt has relaxed border controls for Sudanese arrivals since the outbreak of the fighting. But officials, expecting busloads of poorer refugees to follow, worry about what comes next.
A Failed Test: As the crisis in Sudan creates the kind of power vacuum that the United States had hoped to avoid, critics of the Biden administration are blaming a naïve approach to foreign policy for the violence.

Elian Peltier is the West Africa correspondent. He joined The Times in 2017 and was previously based in Paris and London. He now lives in Dakar, Senegal. @ElianPeltier

View original: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/world/africa/chad-sudan-conflict.html

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