UN chief calls for ‘immediate’ Sudan ceasefire to end unrest

AFP | United Nations                                                  

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com    

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called on Sudan’s warring parties to immediately cease hostilities yesterday as his envoy to Khartoum said at least 185 people had been killed by the fighting.

The UN chief said any further escalation of the conflict between the army and paramilitary forces, led by rival generals, “could be devastating for the country and the region.” The violence, which erupted on Saturday, raged for a third day through Monday, with the death toll increasing to at least 185 people, Volker Perthes, the United Nations’s special representative to Sudan, told reporters.

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 the powerful paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (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.