Director-General of the World Health Organisation (WHO) Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus (second right), visits a children’s hospital in Port Sudan.
Sudan has rejected a call by UN experts for the deployment of an “independent and impartial force” to protect millions of civilians driven from their homes by more than a year of war. The conflict since April last year, pitting the army against paramilitary forces, has killed tens of thousands of people and triggered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. The independent UN experts said Friday their fact-finding mission had uncovered “harrowing” violations by both sides, “which may amount to war crimes and crimes against humanity”. They called for “an independent and impartial force with a mandate to safeguard civilians” to be deployed “without delay”. The Sudanese foreign ministry, which is loyal to the army under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, said in a statement late Saturday that “the Sudanese government rejects in their entirety the recommendations of the UN mission.” It called the UN Human Rights Council, which created the fact-finding mission last year, “a political and illegal body”, and the panel’s recommendations “a flagrant violation of their mandate”. The UN experts said 8mn civilians have been displaced. More than 25mn people — upwards of half the country’s population — face acute food shortages. World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on a visit to Sudan yesterday, said: “The scale of the emergency is shocking, as is the insufficient action being taken to curtail the conflict and respond to the suffering it is causing.” In Port Sudan, where government offices and the UN have relocated to due to the intense fighting in the capital Khartoum, Tedros called on the “world to wake up and help Sudan out of the nightmare it is living through”.
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