Can the truce of the fighting in Sudan go through Saudi mediation? The Sudanese army, which has been fighting paramilitaries for control of power for three weeks, announced on Friday (May 5th) that it had sent negotiators to Saudi Arabia. The fighting has claimed hundreds of lives and threatens to push another two million people into hunger.

While airstrikes and explosions continued to shake different neighborhoods of Khartoum throughout the day, the army of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane announced in the evening that it had dispatched negotiators to Saudi Arabia, after 21 days of fighting that left 700 dead, 5,000 wounded, 335,000 displaced and 115,000 refugees.

These emissaries will meet in Jeddah to "discuss the details of the truce" several times renewed but never respected, she explained, without the other camp, that of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) of General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo, comment immediately.

For several days, the UN envoy to Sudan, Volker Perthes, explains that the two belligerents had said they were "ready to start technical discussions" focusing only on the modalities of a ceasefire, citing Saudi Arabia as a possible meeting place.

A return to political negotiations on the future of a country emerged in 2019 from 30 years of military-Islamist dictatorship to plunge back under the control of the military with the putsch of the two generals in 2021 will only be possible after a real truce, he had hammered.

Beyond the direct victims, this new war increases hunger, a scourge that already affected one in three Sudanese. According to the UN, between 2 and 2.5 million more people could suffer from acute malnutrition within six months if the conflict continues.

'Disaster'

Faced with the "catastrophe" denounced by humanitarians, the international community is struggling to act in organized ranks. The UN Human Rights Council will hold a special session on 11 May, nearly a month after hostilities began.

On Sunday, May 7, it is the ministers of the Arab League countries who must examine "the Sudanese file" on which they are deeply divided, after several discussions between leaders of the African Union (AU) and Igad, the regional organization of East Africa.

US-Saudi mediation does not always seem to converge with other regional efforts to silence the guns. In Washington, President Joe Biden brandished Thursday, May 4, the threat of sanctions but limited himself to denouncing "individuals who threaten peace", without naming anyone.

"Protracted" conflict

For US intelligence, a "protracted" conflict in the country of 45 million people is to be expected because "both sides believe they can prevail militarily and have little reason to come to the negotiating table" to discuss their political future.

The UN warns that 860,000 people, Sudanese but also many South Sudanese returning to their country, could cross borders in the coming months and calls for 402 million euros to help the country, one of the poorest in the world.

"More than 56,000 people" have arrived in Egypt, according to the UN, "30,000 in Chad", "more than 12,000" in Ethiopia and 10,000 in the Central African Republic.

Afdal Abdel Rahim is waiting to cross into Egypt. "When the war started, with bombing and airstrikes," she told AFP, "we left our homes and fled to Wadi Halfa," the last town before Egypt where thousands of Sudanese fleeing the war are rushing.

In Darfur, on the western border of Chad, civilians have been armed to participate in clashes between military, paramilitary and tribal or rebel fighters, according to the UN.

The NGO Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), whose premises were looted, counts "at least 191 dead, dozens of homes burned and thousands displaced" in this region ravaged in the 2000s by a conflict that left about 300,000 dead and 2.5 million displaced according to the UN.

Witnesses also reported fighting in El-Obeid on Thursday, 300 km south of the capital. In the unaffected coastal city of Port Sudan, the UN and more and more NGOs are trying to negotiate the delivery of these shipments to Khartoum and Darfur where hospitals and humanitarian stocks have been looted and bombed.

With AFP

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