Both sides in Sudan’s civil war have committed abuses that may amount to war crimes and world powers need to send peacekeepers and expand an arms embargo to protect civilians, the UN mission said on Friday.
Sudan’s army and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) attacked civilians, resorted to torture and carried out arbitrary detentions, according to the 19-page report which investigators say was based on 182 interviews with survivors, their families and witnesses.
“The gravity of these findings underscores the urgent and immediate need for action to protect civilians,” said the chairman of the UN fact-finding mission, Mohamed Chande Othman. He called for the immediate deployment of an independent and impartial peacekeeping mission.
Both sides have rejected previous accusations from the United States and human rights groups, and have accused each other of committing abuses. Neither immediately responded to a request for comment on Friday, nor issued a statement in response to the report.
The mission called for an expansion of the arms embargo that currently applies only to the western Darfur region, a war that began in Khartoum in April last year and has spread to 14 of the country’s 18 states.
The reported abuses may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity, the mission said.
The mission also said it found reasonable grounds to believe that the RSF and its allied militias had committed additional war crimes, including sexual slavery and the recruitment of child soldiers in the conflict.
The investigation team said it had tried to contact Sudanese authorities on several occasions but had received no response.
The conflict began when competition between the army and the RSF, which had previously shared power after staging a coup, turned into open warfare.
Civilians in Sudan face worsening hunger, mass displacement and disease after 17 months of war, aid agencies say.
U.S.-led mediators said last month they had assurances from both sides at talks in Switzerland to improve access for humanitarian aid, but that the absence of the Sudanese army from the discussions had hampered progress.
The report is the three-member mission’s first since its creation in October 2023 by the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.
A group of Western countries including the United States and Britain will call for its renewal at a meeting starting next week, with diplomats expecting opposition from Sudan, which considers the war an internal matter.
This content was originally published in Unpublished report details abuses in Sudan and calls for international intervention on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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