The “unprecedented” conflict between Sudan’s army and a rival paramilitary force now in its seventh month is getting closer to South Sudan and the disputed Abyei region, UN Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa Hanna Serwaa Tetteh warned on Monday.
Tetteh said that the paramilitary Rapid Support Force had seized an airport and oil field in Belila, about 55km southwest of the capital of Sudan’s West Kordofan State.
The conflict “is profoundly affecting bilateral relations between Sudan and South Sudan, with significant humanitarian, security, economic and political consequences that are a matter of deep concern among the South Sudanese political leadership,” she told the UN Security Council.
Photo: Reuters
Sudan was plunged into chaos in the middle of April, when tensions between the military and the Rapid Support Force exploded into open warfare in the capital, Khartoum, and other areas across the east African nation.
More than 9,000 people have been killed, according to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data project, which tracks Sudan’s war.
The fighting has driven more than 4.5 million people to flee their homes to other places inside Sudan and more than 1.2 million to seek refuge in neighboring countries, UN data showed.
Sudan plunged into turmoil after its leading military figure, General Abdel-Fattah Burhan, led a coup in October 2021 that upended a short-run democratic transition following three decades of rule by Omar al-Bashir.
Since April, his troops have been fighting the Rapid Support Force, commanded by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo.
Both sides have been taking part in talks aimed at ending the conflict in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah, brokered by Saudi Arabia and the US, since late last month.
However, the fighting has continued.
The Security Council meeting focused on the UN peacekeeping force in the oil-rich Abyei region, whose status was unresolved after South Sudan became independent from Sudan in 2011.
The region’s majority Ngok Dinka people favor South Sudan, while the Misseriya nomads who travel to Abyei to find pasture for their cattle favor Sudan.
With the Rapid Support Force’s seizures in Belila, the military confrontation between Sudan’s two sides “is getting closer to the border with Abyei and South Sudan,” Tetteh said.
“These military developments are likely to have adverse consequences on Abyei’s social fabric and the already fragile coexistence between the Misseriya and the Ngok Dinka,” she said.
UN Under-Secretary-General for Peace Operations Jean-Pierre Lacroix told the council that the outbreak of the Sudan conflict “interrupted the encouraging signs of dialogue between the Sudan and South Sudan witnessed earlier in 2023.”
It had put on hold “the political process with regard to the final status of Abyei and border issues,” Lacroix said.
Tetteh echoed Lacroix, saying that “there is no appetite from key Sudanese and South Sudanese leaders to raise the status of Abyei.”
Representatives of the communities in Abyei are very aware of the conflict’s “adverse consequences” on the resumption of talks on the region, and expressed the need to keep the Abyei dispute on the UN and African Union agendas, she said.
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