Sudan: Furious row at UN as Russia blocks resolution to protect civilians. SAF chief praises Russia UN veto

IN a move strongly condemned by the UK and US, Russia has vetoed a draft UK-backed UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Sudan. See video of voting and meeting on a draft resolution to protect civilians in Sudan: 14 voted in favour, 1 voted against (Russia), 0 abstentions. Sudan's army chief Gen. Burhan said the army would not negotiate or agree to a ceasefire without a "full retreat" by the RSF. More in three reports below.

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From BBC News online
By Damian Zane & Will Ross
Dated Mon 18 Nov 2024; Updated Tue 19 Nov 2024 - full copy:

Furious row at UN as Russia blocks Sudan ceasefire move

IMAGE SOURCE, REUTERS. 

Image caption, More than 11 million people have fled the fighting

In a move strongly condemned by the UK and US, Russia has vetoed a draft UK-backed UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Sudan.

British Foreign Secretary David Lammy called the veto a "disgrace". But Russia accused the UK of meddling in Sudanese affairs without involving Sudan itself.

Sudan's 19-month civil war is believed to have led to the deaths of tens of thousands of people. More than 11 million have been forced from their homes.

Aid workers say the conflict has created the world's worst humanitarian crisis, with many thousands at risk of famine.

Sudanese activists have been highly critical of the UN for being slow to respond to the conflict.

It began in April last year after the army and a powerful paramilitary group, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), began a vicious struggle for power.

The military is in control of the government.

Monday's draft resolution, proposed by the UK and Sierra Leone, called on both sides to immediately halt hostilities and start talks aimed at agreeing a national ceasefire.

It also called on the army and RSF to respect previous agreements to protect civilians, but specifically mentioned RSF attacks in the western region of Darfur and elsewhere in the country.

Sudan's representative at the UN said that clauses that it wanted in the text were not included.

Aside from Russia, all the other 14 Security Council member states voted in favour of the draft, but the veto meant the resolution did not pass.

"This Russian veto is a disgrace and it shows to the world yet again Russia’s true colours," Lammy told the meeting in New York.

"I ask the Russian representative in all conscience sitting there on his phone. How many more Sudanese have to be killed? How many more women have to be raped? How many more children have to go without food before Russia will act?"

US ambassador to the UN Linda Thomas-Greenfield was equally outspoken, accusing Russia of obstructing moves "to address the catastrophic situation in Sudan, and playing both sides – both sides of the conflict to advance its own political objectives, at the expense of Sudanese lives".

Russia was once seen as backing the RSF in the conflict, but appears to have switched sides.

Russia's representative at the UN, Dmitry Polyanskiy, said that Sudanese sovereignty was being ignored, adding that the UK-backed resolution was "an attempt to give themselves an opportunity to meddle" in what was happening in Sudan.

"Shame on you, the UK!", he posted on X later, external. "For trying to push through a resolution that pours gasoline into [the] Sudan crisis leaving muddy waters for Western countries, that they love so much in former colonies, to push for their agenda."

Sudan analyst Alex de Waal described this as an "absolutely extraordinary argument to make in the face of the humanitarian catastrophe - the total state collapse of Sudan and the fact that the government is only able to govern a very small corner of the country".

In an interview with the BBC World Service's Newsday programme he added that it was a "very bad day for Africa" as previously the continent's diplomats through the Africa Union (AU) had managed to bridge the divides in the Security Council between Russia, the US and China when it came to Sudan.

Speaking after the Security Council's discussions had finished, Sudan’s ambassador to the UN, Al-Harith Idriss al-Harith Mohamed, said that certain "prerequisites" were not in the draft.

He said that Sudan had wanted a clause condemning the United Arab Emirate's backing of the RSF, something which the UAE has consistently denied.

He also wanted the RSF to be classified as "terrorists... because it wages a war of extermination against civilians".

Both the army and the RSF have been accused of human rights violations that could amount to war crimes.

Additional reporting by the BBC's Nada Tawfik in New York

More about the Sudan conflict from the BBC:

Rape me, not my daughter' - women tell BBC of sexual violence in Sudan
WATCH: Inside a hospital on the front line of Sudan’s hunger crisis
A simple guide to the Sudan war

WATCH: 'They ransacked my home and left my town in ruins'
Women raped in war-hit Sudan die by suicide, activists say
'Our future is over': Forced to flee by a year of war
Starvation in war-hit Sudan 'almost everywhere' - WHO
Hundreds die from cholera as war rages in Sudan

View original: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c33elmnzj0po

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Related reports

Sudan Watch - Mon 18 Nov 2024

Sudan: Vote on a Draft Resolution to Protect Civilians

WATCH: Full meeting. 14 voted in favour, 1 against (Russia), 0 abstentions

https://sudanwatch.blogspot.com/2024/11/sudan-vote-on-draft-resolution-to.html

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AFP - Mon 18 Nov 2024

Sudan army chief rejects 'interference' after Russia UN veto

On Tuesday, Burhan said the army would not negotiate or agree to a ceasefire without a "full retreat" by the RSF. "The end of this war lies in the complete elimination of the rebels," he said, adding that only then could civilian life resume, aid flow to all Sudanese and only and political matters be addressed. ... Last month, UN experts accused both sides of using "starvation tactics" against 26 million civilians, as aid groups warned of a "historic" hunger crisis forcing families to eat leaves and insects.

https://www.jacarandafm.com/news/news/sudan-army-chief-rejects-interference-russia-un-veto/

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Sudan army launches attack on Khartoum as rapidly spreading cholera outbreak kills 500 in two months

Report from Channel 4 News UK 

By Lindsey Hilsum 

International Editor 

Dated Friday, 27 September 2024 - full copy:

Sudan’s army launches major offensive on capital Khartoum

Air strikes and clashes have rocked Khartoum after Sudan’s army launched a major offensive to take back areas it lost early in its war with the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.

It comes as a cholera outbreak that’s killed almost 500 people in two months, appears to be spreading more rapidly. This, in a country where half the 50 million population is suffering severe hunger.

View original: https://www.channel4.com/news/sudans-army-launches-major-offensive-on-capital-khartoum

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Kristof is on Chad-Sudan border: Shame of hunger belongs to those who are powerful, well fed and blind

NOTE from Sudan Watch Editor: Longtime American columnist and Sudan watcher Nicholas Kristof is back in the saddle on the Chad-Sudan border. 

Kristof is a great storyteller who never lets a few facts get in his way. In his article below, he says a US partner, the UAE, supplies weapons to RSF militia in Sudan but omits to say the US is one of the leading arms traders to UAE. 

Trouble is, eye popping online news tends to spread quickly around the world and is viewed as fact before the truth has had time to get its boots on.

If Nicholas says (he doesn't) 150,000 died in Sudan and others say 15-23K, so be it. Readers of his news in New York Times assume NYT news is true.

In June, UN stated 15,500 fatalities reported in 1,400 incidents targeting civilians; 9.5M displaced – 7.3M internally, 1.9M in neighbouring countries.

This month, ACLED says "since fighting first broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on 15 April 2023, ACLED records over 7,623 events of political violence and more than 23,105 reported fatalities in Sudan. On 5 September 2024, ACLED released corrections to the Sudan data that updated events with fatalities in West Darfur state, as reported by Human Rights Watch (HRW) in its published report titled ‘The Massalit Will Not Come Home’: Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes Against Humanity in El Geneina, West Darfur, Sudan. The new information from HRW resulted in ACLED recording 2,635 additional fatalities in West Darfur during the period of April to November 2023. For more on how ACLED incorporated the information from the HRW report, see this update in the ACLED Knowledge Base".

So, Nicholas is back on the scene. Hold onto your hats Messrs Burhan and Hemeti. Longtime Sudan watchers are alive and well. Vive la révolution! 

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From The New York Times

OPINION editorial by By Nicholas Kristof

Opinion Columnist, reporting from the Chad/Sudan border

Dated 18 September 2024. Here is a full copy, for the record and posterity:

I Just Went to Darfur. Here Is What Shattered Me.

Credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

When an Arab militia rampaged through Maryam Suleiman’s village in the Darfur region of Sudan last year and lined up men and boys to massacre, the gunmen were blunt about their purpose.

“We don’t want to see any Black people,” a militia leader said, adding mockingly: “We don’t even want to see black trash bags.” To make his point, Maryam recalled, he shot a donkey because it was black.

Then the militia members executed men and boys who belonged to Black African ethnic groups, she said. 

“They shot my five brothers, one after the other,” Maryam told me, describing how her youngest brother survived the first bullet and called out to her. Then a militia member shot him in the head and sneeringly asked her what she thought of that.

The militia tried to systematically kill all the males over 10, Maryam said, and also killed some younger ones. A 1-day-old boy was thrown to the ground and killed, and one male infant was thrown into a pond to drown, she said.

The gunmen then rounded up the women and girls in a corral to rape, she added. “They raped many, many girls,” she recalled. One man tried to rape Maryam, she said, and when he failed he beat her. She was pregnant and suffered a miscarriage.

“You’re slaves,” Maryam quoted the militia members as saying. “There is no place for you Black people in Sudan.” So Maryam fled to neighboring Chad and is one of more than 10 million Sudanese who have been forcibly displaced since a civil war began last year in the country and ignited pogroms against Black African ethnic groups like hers.

Maryam Suleiman wept as she recounted how a militia in Sudan attacked her village and killed her five brothers. Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof

The atrocities underway near here are an echo of the Darfur genocide of two decades ago, with the additional complication of famine. But there’s a crucial difference: At that time, world leaders, celebrities and university students vigorously protested the slaughter and joined forces to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Today, in contrast, the world is distracted and silent. So the impunity is allowing violence to go unchecked, which, in turn, is producing what may become the worst famine in half a century or more.

“It’s beyond anything we’ve ever seen,” Cindy McCain, the executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, told me. “It’s catastrophic.”

“Unless,” she added, “we can get our job done.”

World leaders will convene next week in New York for the annual United Nations General Assembly, but they have been mostly indifferent and are unlikely to get the job done. What’s needed is far greater pressure to end the civil war between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the rival Arab militia, while pushing the warring parties to allow humanitarian access. All sides in the war are behaving irresponsibly, so more than half the people of Sudan — 25 million people — have become acutely malnourished already. A famine was formally declared in one area in Sudan in the summer.

WATCH VIDEO 2:18

Nicholas Kristof on the Silent Famine in Darfur

This is what I witnessed — and it shattered me.

Timmo Gaasbeek, a disaster expert who has modeled the crisis for a research institute in the Netherlands, told me that he foresees 13 million people starving to death in Sudan by October 2025, with a margin of error of two million. Such a toll would make this one of the worst famines in world history and the worst since the great Chinese famine of 65 years ago. By way of contrast, the famous Ukraine famine of the 1930s killed perhaps four million people, although estimates vary.

I can’t verify that a cataclysm of that level is approaching. Warring parties blocked me from entering Sudanese areas they controlled, so I reported along the Chad-Sudan border. Arriving refugees described starvation but not yet mass mortality from malnutrition.

All I can say is that whether or not a cataclysmic famine is probable, it is a significant risk. Those in danger are people like Thuraya Muhammad, a slight 17-year-old orphan who told me how her world unraveled when the Rapid Support Forces, the same group that killed Maryam’s five brothers, attacked her village and began burning homes and shooting men and boys.

“So many men were killed, like grains of sand,” she told me.

When Thuraya Muhammad, an orphan because of Sudan’s war, doesn’t have enough food to feed her younger sister and brother, she gives them water to fill their stomachs. Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof

After slaughtering the men in Thuraya’s village, the militia raped many women and girls, she said. Thuraya’s cousin, a woman of 20, was among those kidnapped by the militia and hasn’t been seen since, she added.

Thuraya’s father was murdered by the militia and her mother had died earlier, so at 16 she was now the head of the household. She led her younger brother and two younger sisters to safety by walking to the Chadian border town of Adré. Gunmen tried to rob them several times, but the family had nothing left to steal.

Now in a refugee camp in Chad, Thuraya works to feed her siblings. Like other refugees, she gets a monthly food allotment from the World Food Program that helps but is insufficient. She supports her family by seeking day jobs washing clothes or cleaning houses (for about 25 cents a day). When she finds work, she and her siblings eat; if not, they may go hungry.

When I dropped by their hut, Thuraya had been unable to find work that day. A friendly neighbor had given her a cup of coffee, but she hadn’t eaten anything since the previous day — and there was no prospect of dinner, either. If there is no food, Thuraya told me, she serves water to her siblings in place of dinner.

She wept.

Thuraya wasn’t crying from her own pangs of hunger. Rather, tears tumbled silently down her cheeks out of shame at her inability to feed her brother and sisters.

“When there isn’t enough food, I give it to my sisters and brother,” she told me, and her younger sister Fatima confirmed that. “I go hungry, or else my neighbors may call me over to eat with them.”

“I’d rather my sisters and brother eat, because they cry when they go hungry,” she said. “And I can’t bear to hear them cry.”

Fatima resists the favoritism and tries to give her sister back some food. But Thuraya won’t take it and goes out, telling her brother and sisters to eat while she finds something for herself. They all know that in a refugee camp of about 200,000 hungry people, she will find nothing.

I’m hoping that Thuraya’s fortitude might inspire President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, along with world leaders gathering at the United Nations, to summon a similar resolve to tackle slaughter and starvation in Sudan. Donor nations have contributed less than half the sum needed by U.N. agencies to ease Sudan’s food crisis, and they have not insisted forcefully on either providing humanitarian access or on cutting off the flow of weapons that sustains the war.

Biden, who 20 years ago savaged President George W. Bush for not doing enough to stop the Darfur genocide, has provided aid and appointed a special envoy to push for peace talks but has said little about the current crisis. An American partner, the United Arab Emirates, supplies weapons to the militia that slaughtered and raped Thuraya’s neighbors, yet Biden has not publicly demanded that the Emirates cut off that support for killers and rapists.

The upshot of this neglect is the risk not only of a horrendous famine but also of endless war, Sudan’s fragmentation, enormous refugee flows and instability across the region.

So as world leaders at the U.N. General Assembly tuck into fine banquets next week to celebrate their humanitarianism, may they be awakened by thoughts of an orphan of Darfur who ignores her own hunger and divides scraps of bread among her brother and sisters.

Thuraya has no reason to feel ashamed that her siblings are hungry; the shame belongs to those who are powerful, well fed and blind.

What question do you have about the civil war in Sudan and the people affected by it? What more would you like to know? Submit your question or critique in the field below and Nicholas Kristof will try to respond to a selection of queries in a future installment in this series.

Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Chad and Sudan? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.

View original (currently a free gift unlocked article): https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/18/opinion/darfur-sudan-famine.html

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