2023-05-22 23:43:08
AA / New York / Betul Yuruk
Sudan’s warring parties continue their fight without regard to international humanitarian law and norms governing armed conflict, the Special Representative of the SG and Head of the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNITAMS) said on Monday.
Homes, shops, places of worship and electricity and water installations have been destroyed or damaged, Volker Perthes said during a briefing to the UN Security Council.
The conflict-affected African country has for weeks been plagued by violence between the army and the paramilitary group Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
More than 700 people were killed, including 190 children, and another 6,000 were injured, Perthes said.
According to the UN, more than a million people have been displaced and more than 840,000 have sought refuge in rural areas and other provinces, while another 250,000 have left Sudan.
“The growing tendency to give an ethnic character to the crisis risks dragging the country into a long-lasting conflict, with harmful consequences for the region”, warned Volker Perthes.
And to add: “The responsibility for the fights rests with those who fight them daily: the leaders of the two camps who share the responsibility for having chosen to settle their dispute on the battlefield rather than to sit down at the table of negotiations. It is their decision that is ravaging Sudan. And they are able to put an end to it.”
A disagreement has arisen between the two parties in recent months over the integration of the FSR into the armed forces, an essential condition of the transition agreement concluded between the political groups and the Sudanese army.
Sudan has not had an effective government since the fall of 2021, when the military removed Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok’s transitional government and declared a state of emergency, a move Sudanese political forces have called ” Rebellion”.
The transition period, which began in August 2019 following President Omar al-Bashir was ousted, was supposed to end in early 2024 with the holding of elections.
*Translated from English by Mourad Belhaj
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