A United Nations fact-finding mission on Friday called for an international peacekeeping force to protect civilians in Sudan, where a brutal civil war has caused the world’s largest displacement crisis, leaving millions of people homeless and starving.
Both sides in the 17-month conflict — the Sudanese army and its rival, the Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries — have killed, mutilated and tortured people, including children, the three-person mission said in a report that they will present next week to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.
“Given the failure of the warring parties to spare civilians, it is imperative that an independent and impartial force with a mandate to safeguard civilians be deployed without delay,” Mohamed Chande Othman, the panel’s chairman and a former chief justice of Tanzania said Friday in a news conference releasing the report.
The war in Sudan, a giant nation on the Red Sea in Africa’s northeast, has threatened to destabilize its neighbors, and has drawn in other countries. The United Arab Emirates has been supplying weapons to the Rapid Support Forces, though it has denied doing so. Egypt is a longtime supporter of the Sudanese army.
“Fighting will stop once the arms flow stops,” the report says. The panel warned that states supplying arms could find themselves complicit in international war crimes.
The panel urged the U.N. Security Council to expand a longstanding embargo on supplies of weapons to the Darfur region, in the west, to cover the whole country.
The panel accused the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., and its allies of crimes against humanity, citing rampant rape and sexual slavery, the use of children under 15 in the fighting and of carrying out a widespread, systematic attack targeting the non-Arab population in West Darfur.
When attacking the city of El Geneina in June 2023, the R.S.F. went door-to-door hunting down lawyers, doctors, academics and religious leaders of the Massalit community, the panel reported. The R.S.F.’s attack on a convoy of civilians attempting to flee the violence, killed and injured thousands of people.
The panel noted it had shared its report with Sudan’s government but received no response. The panel said it had been in contact with legal officers for the Rapid Support Forces, but gave no details.
The panel’s repeated requests to visit Sudan went unanswered by the Sudanese authorities. The report relied on direct interviews with 182 people, including refugees in neighboring countries, and interaction with regional bodies and multilateral agencies.
The panel did not propose a specific approach to international intervention in Sudan, but said its findings should “serve as a wake up call” on the need for urgent action to protect Sudan’s civilians. The conflict has displaced 10 million people and left the rest of the country facing what international aid agencies this week called a “starvation crisis of historic proportions.”
“Forty-six million people can’t be left on their own to face the two warring parties,” panel member Mona Rishmawi said. “We can’t have people continuing to die before our eyes and do nothing about it.”
American-sponsored talks in Switzerland last month made no progress toward a cease-fire, but did reach commitments to allow some humanitarian aid to flow in, including opening a border crossing to allow aid trucks from neighboring Chad to enter Darfur.
International aid workers have said opening one crossing is inadequate to address the scale of the crisis, and that both warring parties have failed to live up to commitments to open access for more aid.
The panel has started compiling dossiers on individuals and entities responsible for abuses and called for a range of judicial initiatives to ensure those responsible for the carnage are brought to justice. The Security Council has previously given the International Criminal Court jurisdiction to prosecute crimes in Sudan’s Darfur region. The panel recommended giving the court jurisdiction over the whole country.
The I.C.C., Ms Rishmawi noted, only prosecutes a few of its most serious cases, not the individual perpetrators of atrocities whose impunity in past conflicts has perpetuated the cycle of violence. To address this, the panel also called for the creation of an international tribunal that would complement the I.C.C. and prosecute such crimes.
International attention should also focus on victims of atrocities, not just the perpetrators, Ms. Rishmawi added, urging the creation of another body dedicated to providing support and reparations to survivors and their families.
“The rare brutality of this war will have a devastating and long-lasting psychological impact on children in Sudan,” said Joy Ngozi Ezeilo, a Nigerian law professor and the panel’s third member. Any peace process should prioritize support for children to break the cycle of violence.
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