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Sudan’s Foreign Ministry Calls on UN to Criminalize Dealing with RSF

Commander of the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces, Mohamed Dagalo, shakes hands with UN envoy Ramtane Lamamra on Thursday in Uganda (Dagalo's X account)
Commander of the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces, Mohamed Dagalo, shakes hands with UN envoy Ramtane Lamamra on Thursday in Uganda (Dagalo's X account)
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Sudan’s Foreign Ministry Calls on UN to Criminalize Dealing with RSF

Commander of the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces, Mohamed Dagalo, shakes hands with UN envoy Ramtane Lamamra on Thursday in Uganda (Dagalo's X account)
Commander of the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces, Mohamed Dagalo, shakes hands with UN envoy Ramtane Lamamra on Thursday in Uganda (Dagalo's X account)

 The Sudanese Foreign Ministry has urged the international community to criminalize dealing with the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, and to designate the “militia” group as "terrorist."

The Ministry said in a statement that it followed with interest the latest report of the UN observers on the implementation of Security Council Resolution 1591 regarding Darfur and the war waged by the rebel militia, referring to the RSF and its supporters against the Sudanese people.

It quoted the UN report as saying that the number of "between 10,000 and 15,000 people were killed in one city in Sudan's West Darfur region last year in ethnic violence," including women, children, and the elderly.

It considered that the continued supply of advanced weapons provided and facilitated by specific countries, named by the UN observers, and arriving on flights several times a week, in violation of the relevant Security Council resolutions, enabled the rebel militia to expand its military operations and commit atrocities against civilians.

The Ministry also called on the Security Council to assume its responsibility towards the countries that fuel the war in Sudan by providing the militia with weapons and political and media support, saying they should be considered perpetrators of the aggression punishable by international criminal justice.

A report issued by the UN experts accused the RSF group of using large-scale proceeds from gold mining to fund its devastating war against the nation's army.

The report prepared by United Nations investigators and published by Bloomberg on Sunday claimed that Rapid Support receives supplies from a regional country via Chad.

"Violence by the RSF and allied militias may have killed as many as 15,000 people in one city in the Darfur region in 2023," said the UN report, a figure exceeding the UN's previous toll for the nine-month conflict.

The report traced the root of the RSF to the "Janjaweed militias" formed by the Sudanese government under former President Omar al-Bashir to crush a rebellion in Darfur.

The UN experts believe the group benefited from a complex web of financing and new military supply lines across eastern Chad, Libya, and South Sudan and now controls most of Darffur.

The experts said financial networks set up by the RSF before and during the conflict enabled it to acquire weapons, fund media campaigns, pay salaries, and buy backing from political and armed groups.

The experts also noted in their report that since July, the RSF deployed heavy and advanced weapons, including "drones, howitzers, multiple-rocket launchers and anti-aircraft weapons such as MANPADS.

They added, "The new firepower had a major impact on the balance of forces in Darfur and the wider country."

Meanwhile, a landmine killed ten civilians in the Nile River state of North Sudan.

A medical source at a hospital in Shendi city in River Nile state told AFP that "10 civilians were killed as a result of a mine explosion on a bus" on Saturday.

When the blast happened, the bus was transporting passengers from al-Jazira state to Shendi.

It is believed to be the first incident since the outbreak of battles between the army and the RSF in the country.

According to social media activists last week, the Sudanese army warned the Shendi residents to be careful and avoid areas with barricades that include highly sensitive landmines equipped with long-range explosives.

However, the army has not issued an official statement in this regard.

The conflict in Sudan caused the displacement of about 7.5 million people inside and outside the country, according to the UN.

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As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
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As Flooding Becomes a Yearly Disaster in South Sudan, Thousands Survive on the Edge of a Canal

Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)
Children ride in a small canoe around the area where they live in Jonglei state, South Sudan. (Photo: AP)

Long-horned cattle wade through flooded lands and climb a slope along a canal that has become a refuge for displaced families in South Sudan. Smoke from burning dung rises near homes of mud and grass where thousands of people now live after floods swept away their village.
“Too much suffering,” said Bichiok Hoth Chuiny, a woman in her 70s. She supported herself with a stick as she walked in the newly established community of Pajiek in Jonglei state north of the capital, Juba, The Associated Press said.
For the first time in decades, the flooding had forced her to flee. Her efforts to protect her home by building dykes failed. Her former village of Gorwai is now a swamp.
“I had to be dragged in a canoe up to here,” Chuiny said. An AP journalist was the first to visit the community.
Such flooding is becoming a yearly disaster in South Sudan, which the World Bank has described as “the world’s most vulnerable country to climate change and also the one most lacking in coping capacity."
More than 379,000 people have been displaced by flooding this year, according to the UN humanitarian agency.
Seasonal flooding has long been part of the lifestyle of pastoral communities around the Sudd, the largest wetlands in Africa, in the Nile River floodplain. But since the 1960s the swamp has kept growing, submerging villages, ruining farmland and killing livestock.
“The Dinka, Nuer and Murle communities of Jonglei are losing the ability to keep cattle and do farming in that region the way they used to,” said Daniel Akech Thiong, a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group.
South Sudan is poorly equipped to adjust. Independent since 2011, the country plunged into civil war in 2013. Despite a peace deal in 2018, the government has failed to address numerous crises. Some 2.4 million people remain internally displaced by conflict and flooding.
The latest overflowing of the Nile has been blamed on factors including the opening of dams upstream in Uganda after Lake Victoria rose to its highest levels in five years.
The century-old Jonglei Canal, which was never completed, has become a refuge for many.
“We don’t know up to where this flooding would have pushed us if the canal was not there,” said Peter Kuach Gatchang, the paramount chief of Pajiek. He was already raising a small garden of pumpkins and eggplants in his new home.
The 340-kilometer (211-mile) Jonglei Canal was first imagined in the early 1900s by Anglo-Egyptian colonial authorities to increase the Nile’s outflow towards Egypt in the north. But its development was interrupted by the long fight of southern Sudanese against the Sudanese regime in Khartoum that eventually led to the creation of a separate country.
Gatchang said the new community in Pajiek is neglected: "We have no school and no clinic here, and if you stay for a few days, you will see us carrying our patients on stretchers up to Ayod town.”
Ayod, the county headquarters, is reached by a six-hour walk through the waist-high water.
Pajiek also has no mobile network and no government presence. The area is under the control of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-in-Opposition, founded by President Salva Kiir’s rival turned Vice President Riek Machar.
Villagers rely on aid. On a recent day, hundreds of women lined up in a nearby field to receive some from the World Food Program.
Nyabuot Reat Kuor walked home with a 50-kilogram (110-pound) bag of sorghum balanced on her head.
“This flooding has destroyed our farm, killed our livestock and displaced us for good," the mother of eight said. “Our old village of Gorwai has become a river.”
When food assistance runs out, she said, they will survive on wild leaves and water lilies from the swamp. Already in recent years, food aid rations have been cut in half as international funding for such crises drops.
More than 69,000 people who have migrated to the Jonglei Canal in Ayod county are registered for food assistance, according to WFP.
“There are no passable roads at this time of the year, and the canal is too low to support boats carrying a lot of food,” said John Kimemia, a WFP airdrop coordinator.
In the neighboring Paguong village that is surrounded by flooded lands, the health center has few supplies. Medics haven’t been paid since June due to an economic crisis that has seen civil servants nationwide go unpaid for more than a year.
South Sudan’s economic woes have deepened with the disruption of oil exports after a major pipeline was damaged in Sudan during that country's ongoing civil war.
“The last time we got drugs was in September. We mobilized the women to carry them on foot from Ayod town,” said Juong Dok Tut, a clinical officer.
Patients, mostly women and children, sat on the ground as they waited to see the doctor. Panic rippled through the group when a thin green snake passed among them. It wasn't poisonous, but many others in the area are. People who venture into the water to fish or collect water lilies are at risk.
Four life-threatening snake bites cases occurred in October, Tut said. “We managed these cases with the antivenom treatments we had, but now they’re over, so we don’t know what to do if it happens again.”