Children walk through the Korsi refugee camp, in Birao, Central African Republic, on August 10, 2024. Over 80 per cent of the camp's residents are women and children who have fled war in neighbouring Darfur in search of safety.AMAURY FALT-BROWN/AFP/Getty Images
After 16 months of massacres and war crimes, Sudan’s besieged civilians need to be protected by an arms embargo and an international peacekeeping force, a United Nations fact-finding mission has found.
The investigators, appointed by the UN Human Rights Council, interviewed more than 180 survivors and eyewitnesses to compile evidence of a horrific range of war crimes by both sides in the war: the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
The report gives details of systematic rape, torture, massacres and sexual slavery by the RSF and its allied militias, along with evidence of indiscriminate air strikes and shelling by both sides that caused destruction to civilian homes, schools, hospitals, communication networks, electricity and water supplies.
“We cannot continue to have people dying in front of our eyes and do nothing about it,” mission member Mona Rishmawi told a briefing in Geneva as the mission released its report on Friday.
“People are moving from one area to another, attacked, shelled, bombarded, facing rape and torture at checkpoints. We’re talking 46 million people in Sudan, and they cannot be left on their own to face these two warring parties. There is a need for international political will to protect the civilians.”
Women’s bodies have become “a theatre of operation for this war,” she said. “This has to stop.”
Since the beginning of the war in April, 2023, ceasefire negotiations have repeatedly failed, and one U.S. diplomat estimated that as many as 150,000 people have died.
The report calls for the current arms embargo, covering only the Darfur region, to be expanded to the entire country. “Fighting will stop once the arms flow stops,” it said.
The International Criminal Court, which has jurisdiction only in Darfur, should have its mandate expanded to all of Sudan so that war crimes and crimes against humanity can be fully investigated, the report said.
It also recommends the deployment of “an independent and impartial force with a mandate to protect civilians in Sudan.”
While there is growing support for some form of international intervention to try to halt Sudan’s war, most analysts believe that the UN Security Council is unlikely to approve a peacekeeping force or an expanded arms embargo, since Russia and China are likely to veto it.
The fact-finding mission voiced its concern at the signs of starvation and famine in Sudan as a result of the war. “Children are malnourished and dying, and yet so little is known about this conflict in the world,” said Joy Ngozi Ezeilo, an expert member of the mission.
“It’s really heartbreaking,” she told the briefing. “In Africa, it’s a big question, people worry, ‘Is it because it is Africa?’ Why is so little heard about this conflict, where thousands of people have died and there is famine of millions of people, with people eating grass to stay alive?”
A report this week by the Famine Early Warning Systems Network, a U.S. agency, warned of “alarmingly high levels of starvation, acute malnutrition, and mortality” in El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur, where the RSF and Sudanese military have been fighting for months.
More than eight million people in Sudan are facing emergency levels of hunger, humanitarian agencies say. Famine has already been officially declared in a refugee camp in North Darfur where about 500,000 people are sheltering. At a health centre in South Darfur, four to five children are dying of malnutrition every day, the relief agency Mercy Corps recently reported.
The UN fact-finding mission gave harrowing examples of atrocities in the war, including the RSF’s systematic door-to-door killings of Masalit people in Darfur, which targeted doctors, lawyers, academics and community leaders.
In one massacre, the RSF and its allies ambushed a long convoy of people fleeing from the Darfur city of El Geneina. “The attackers fired at the convoy from their vehicles, killing and injuring thousands of individuals, leaving many dead bodies on the streets,” it said.
The report also described widespread sexual violence by RSF soldiers, including the rape of girls as young as eight and women as old as 75.
“Some victims described that they were abducted and forcibly held and confined in a house or a room for a duration ranging from several days to several months, during which they were deprived of their liberty and subjected to repeated rape and/or sexual exploitation by different RSF members and threatened with violence or death in case they tried to leave or resist sexual violence.”
While the report contained more detail on RSF atrocities, it also documented a series of war crimes and other abuses by the Sudanese military, including the bombing of civilian homes and infrastructure, the killing of children, sexual violence, attacks on schools, arbitrary arrests, torture of detainees, shutdowns of internet access and blocking humanitarian aid.