{"id":20072941,"date":"2024-02-18T13:24:31","date_gmt":"2024-02-18T12:24:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dabangasudan.org\/?p=20072941"},"modified":"2024-02-19T11:54:43","modified_gmt":"2024-02-19T10:54:43","slug":"sudan-civil-society-urges-au-military-intervention-to-stop-the-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dabangasudan.org\/en\/all-news\/article\/sudan-civil-society-urges-au-military-intervention-to-stop-the-war","title":{"rendered":"Civil society orgs urge AU military intervention in Sudan"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Representatives of Sudanese and African civil society organisations held a consultative meeting on the sidelines of the annual African Union summit in the Ethiopian capital on Friday. They urged the AU to send a military force to stop human rights violations and ensure the arrival of humanitarian aid.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dabanga correspondent Ashraf Abdelaziz reported from Addis Ababa, where the annual AU summit\u2019s 37th Ordinary Session\u00a0opened yesterday, that the meeting of the CSOs concluded with a statement in which they condemned \u201cthe ongoing violent confrontations between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and its allied militias\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The statement referred to multiple crimes against civilians, including arbitrary executions, detention, torture, sexual violence, and violations of freedom of expression and assembly, particularly targeting peace activists and humanitarian workers. It criticised the Sudanese military command\u2019s disregard for international warnings about human rights, especially the joint warning<\/a> by 30 United Nations experts on the situation in Sudan issued on February 5.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More than 20,000 people have been killed in Sudan since the SAF-RSF battles erupted in mid-April last year, about 11 million people fled their homes, nearly 25 million people, one third of the population, suffer from acute malnutrition, and about 80 per cent of health care facilities in conflict areas have stopped operating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In their statement to the AU, the CSOs called on the \u201cAfrican statesmen participating in this session of the African Union Assembly\u201d to condemn the violence, demand a ceasefire, put pressure on the warring parties to end the conflict, send a military force to stop human rights violations and ensure the arrival of humanitarian aid, and establish a mechanism to monitor and document human rights violations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The AU should \u201cactivate Article 4 of its Constitutive Act<\/a> and dispatch a military force to end the gross violations of human rights and humanitarian law, including war crimes, crimes against humanity, and acts of ethnic cleansing occurring in Sudan\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The African leaders should further take \u201cimmediate measures to ensure the establishment of humanitarian corridors to deliver necessary relief materials to populations in need without delay, especially in Darfur\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

African countries and international actors are to be mobilised to put pressure on the warring parties and force the leaders of the warring parties to put an immediate end to the conflict and to establish a monitoring mechanism concerning on the widespread violations of human rights and international humanitarian law by members of both warring parties, with particular attention to the situation in Darfur.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Absent on agenda<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Dabanga reported on Friday, the Sudan war is missing on the agenda<\/a> of the current AU summit. Africa Intelligence stated<\/a> two days earlier that \u201cNone of Africa’s pressing political and security crises, such as those in Sudan, Ethiopia or the Sahel, are on the agenda of this weekend’s continental gathering. Instead, leaders are set to focus on drier matters such as internal reforms and Agenda 2063\u201d. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abdelbagi Jibril, Sudanese human rights expert and director of the Darfur Relief and Documentation Centre in Geneva, referred to this “significant omission” at the opening of the consultative meeting. For this reason, \u201cthe civil society organisations are intensifying their pressure so that the sounds of the Sudanese\u2019s sufferings can be heard within the summit,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He also expressed his regret about relief materials not reaching those affected by the violence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jibril further praised the stance of the AU towards Sudan but said that \u201cthe union needs better briefings to erase its misconceptions\u201d, citing that \u201cthe AU was one of the staunchest defenders of the Al Bashir government as a result of the misinformation it was given\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Hannah Forster, director of the Gambia-based African Centre for Democracy and Human Rights Studies, the Sudan crisis results from previous accumulations and the neglect by African institutions of civil society organisations\u2019 warnings about the danger of Al Bashir government (1989-2019) and its formation of the Janjaweed militias.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Abdelaziz also cites Ibrahim Hamed, director of the London Media Centre, who said in his address to the meeting that \u201cThe real crisis is the fragmentation of solutions,\u201d resulting from \u201cthe discrepancy between the political forces that appeared since independence\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On 21 December last year, the UN Security Council unanimously adopted a\u00a0resolution\u00a0that created a framework to fund AU peace operations<\/a>.\u00a0Some diplomats have suggested using this framework to backstop a ceasefire monitoring force should Sudan\u2019s belligerents stop fighting, though they acknowledge such a mission would be difficult to carry out, Crisis Group experts Daniel Forti and Liesl Louw-Vaudran\u00a0stated in an analysis last week.<\/p>\n