UN CHIEF CALLS FOR SUDAN CEASEFIRE AS 185 DIE IN CRISIS
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The United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has called for a cease-fire in Sudan on Monday amid fighting between the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Khartoum.
More than 185 people have died as a result of the crisis, and Guterres called for an end to hostilities after noting that any further escalation of the war between the army and paramilitary forces, “could be devastating for the country and the region.”
The UN special representative to Sudan, Volker Perthes has been in contact with the leaders to suspend the war which erupted Saturday, and has raged for a third day through Monday, AP said.
The fighting broke out after weeks of power struggles between the two generals who seized power in a 2021 coup: Sudan’s army chief, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, who commands RSF.
“I am in constant contact with leaders of both sides,” Perthes told reporters at the UN headquarters in New York, via video link from the Sudanese capital.
The UN has suspended much of its operations in the country, said Guterres’s spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, who stressed the UN was “not going to ask staff to go to work when clearly their safety is not being guaranteed.”
“This renewed fighting only aggravates what was already a fragile situation, forcing UN agencies and our humanitarian partners to temporarily shutter many of our more than 250 programmes across Sudan,” the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, Martin Griffiths, said in a statement.
“The impacts of this suspension will be felt immediately, especially in the areas of food security and nutritional support, in a country where some 4 million children and pregnant and lactating women are severely malnourished,” he added.
The UN Security Council held a closed-door meeting on the situation in Sudan on Monday morning.
The three African members of the 15-member Council — Ghana, Gabon and Mozambique — released a joint statement following the meeting, calling for an “immediate ceasefire.”
The countries called on the Sudanese military and the RSF “to swiftly embrace in the spirit of the Ramadan season, a peaceful solution and inclusive dialogue to resolve their differences,” they said.
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