UN Security Council and Sudan: Arms embargo exposes gap between international will and action

By Ashraf Abdelaziz for Radio Dabanga

The UN Security Council held an emergency session in New York on Monday, convened by Denmark to discuss the protection of civilians and the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Sudan. Against this backdrop, analyst Mohammed Saleh Yass explained that the agenda focused on the transformation of aid into an instrument of pressure and commerce, alongside a major proposal to amend paragraph 3(c) of Resolution 1591, adopted in 2005, with the aim of extending the arms export ban to the whole of Sudan rather than Darfur alone, under international humanitarian law.

Denmark’s statement and the US proposal

Danish foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen held the Security Council responsible for stopping the war, calling for a humanitarian truce and an expansion of the International Criminal Court’s mandate to cover all of Sudan.

Masad Boulos, adviser to the US president, proposed extending the arms export ban currently imposed on Darfur to the whole country, including drones and their components. He said the involvement of more than 12 countries providing military support had prolonged the war.

International positions and Burhan’s response

Denmark, Britain, and France backed the US proposal, while China, Russia, and Sudan’s representative openly opposed it.

In Sudan, Abdelfattah El Burhan downplayed the impact of any additional sanctions in remarks to the police, and attacked those opposing his government. He also criticised the Sumud alliance, and urged people to ignore what he described as malicious claims about the imposition of a no-fly zone over the country.

Local reactions

Positions on the proposal varied. Abdelrahman El Nair, spokesman for the Sudan Liberation Movement, backed it in comments to Radio Dabanga, saying it was appropriate for protecting civilians.

Khalid Omer Youssef, a senior figure in the Sumud alliance, also welcomed the move, saying that pressure needed to form part of a comprehensive package that complemented the Peace We Want charter.

Dr Mohammed Zakaria, spokesman for the Democratic Bloc, strongly rejected the proposal in comments to Radio Dabanga. He argued that it deprived the legitimate army of its rights by equating it with what he called the Rapid Support Forces militia, and violated Sudan’s sovereignty.

Arman’s view of the crisis

Yasser Arman, leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement – Revolutionary Current, criticised partial proposals, describing them as an attempt to manage the war rather than resolve it. He warned against repeating what he described as the failure of Resolution 1591 over the past 22 years.

He called for a joint meeting of the African Union and UN Security Councils to apply pressure for a comprehensive roadmap that would preserve Sudan’s unity and bring the war to a definitive end.

Denial of the coup and Omar Yousif El Degair’s response

During the session, Sudan’s representative, El Harith Idriss, denied that a coup had taken place on 25 October, claiming that the government had resigned voluntarily.

Engineer Omar Yousif El Degair rejected the statement, describing it as a deliberate distortion and falsification of a documented historical event that Burhan himself had announced when he dissolved the institutions of the transitional government.

He said that distorting the facts undermined the credibility of the official Sudanese position in the eyes of the international community.

UN figures and officials’ statements

The UN said it had documented the deaths of 1,400 civilians this year, with 80% of them – about 1,100 people – killed in drone attacks, according to Rosemary DiCarlo, the under-secretary-general for political and peacebuilding affairs.

Tom Fletcher, the UN humanitarian chief, said two-thirds of Sudan’s population needed life-saving assistance. He condemned the world’s provision of drones and mercenaries instead of food and medicine, arguing that the tragedy lay in the absence of international political will.

Has the council moved from words to action?

The session’s deliberations exposed a continuing and profound gap between diagnosis and implementation. Amid international divisions and the threat of vetoes, the Security Council’s actions remain constrained by piecemeal measures and statements.

Without binding mechanisms to bring the fighting to a complete halt, the question remains whether the international community has the will to move towards meaningful action, or whether it will continue merely to manage the crisis at the cost of Sudanese lives.

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Editor’s note: This article has been translated from Arabic with the assistance of artificial intelligence, and subsequently reviewed and adapted by a human editor before publication.