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The UK Government has been criticised by leading NGOs and Sudanese Civil Society organisations for failing to include any Sudanese organisations in the much-vaunted Sudan summit in London this Tuesday.
The conference was organised by Foreign Secretary David Lammy and co-hosted with France, Germany, the EU and African Union for the second anniversary of the conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) a paramilitary organisation that has attacked the non-Arabic ethnic groups in Darfur.
The conference followed a weekend of brutal massacres of civilians by the RSF in refugee camps around Darfur with 300 killed according to the UN, and the mass displacement of up to 400,000 civilians from the Zamzam refugee camp and the city of El-Fasher.
Both warring parties were excluded from the conference as were members of Sudanese civil society.
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At an event previewing the conference, aid and human rights NGOs operating in Sudan criticised the exclusion of Sudanese civilian advocates.
Dr Eva Khair, director of Sudan Transnational Consortium told members of the press “to see more agency going to backers of the conflict than to any single Sudanese voice, that’s really concerning”.
The groups emphasised that the focus had to be on civilian protection and encouraged the Government to take “low hanging fruit” such as restoring telecommunications to areas of Sudan that are under blackout.
The communications blackout makes it very difficult for aid workers to operate and severely limits the ability of civilians to access money.
The NGO PAEMA (Preventing and ending mass atrocities) said one goal of the conference should be to “restore telecoms access across all of Sudan to enable the timely and accurate documentation of serious violations of human rights”.
PAEMA and another NGO Avaaz took out an ad in the Financial Times this morning urging David Lammy to take steps to break the blackout.
Yasmine Ahmed, Human Rights Watch UK Director said “this has been, and continues to be, a war on civilians. Civilians are not just collateral damage, this is targeted violence against civilians […] For two years millions of civilians have desperately called on the international community to take concrete measures to protect them, and to date the international community has utterly failed them. The consequences of this failure is playing out today in El-Fasher and the two displacement camps around El-Fasher”.
At the opening of the conference David Lammy and his French and German counterparts Jean-Noël Barrot and Analena Baerbock announced aid packages of £120 million and €125 million respectively.
The United Arab Emirates, a key military and financial ally of the RSF attended the talks.
The UAE has been accused of secretly funnelling guns to the RSF via Chad, a charge which it had strongly denied, however a leaked UN report seen by the Guardian revealed several flights from the UAE in which transport planes made apparently deliberate attempts to avoid detection as they flew into bases in Chad.
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Lammy may come under pressure to sanction the UAE, with which the UK is closely allied if the violence by the RSF continues with the backing of Abu Dhabi.
Ali Youssef al-Sharif, Sudan’s foreign minister said on Monday “Inviting the UAE doesn’t correspond to the message that this conference is about peace”.
Dr Eva Khair told Byline Times that the mark of success of the conference would be “if the killing stops in the next 24 hours” referring to the rapid killings of civilians by the RSF in their assault on El-Fasher and Zamzam.
At an event previewing the conference, Kate Ferguson, the co-director of the NGO Protection Approaches, said “the conference must directly combat and seek to halt the unfolding genocide in Darfur” and added that this was “a test” for the kind of foreign secretary Lammy wishes to be.
Recent developments under the Trump administration have also “exacerbated the situation” according to Tariq Riebl of the Norwegian Refugee Council. He told journalists how NRC had to lay off some employees in Sudan following the “uncertainty” generated by Trump’s USAID cuts.
Nic Pyatt of Nonviolent Peaceforce in Sudan said “El-Fasher and Zamzam are not newly affected areas, they have been under siege for months […] we have had warnings out for many months that El-Fasher will be a strategic target for certain armed groups, then there will be the vulnerability of Tawila so people are just moving from one incredibly dangerous and hostile area to another. It will not stop unless there is political pressure from the international community. Civilians have been on their own for months, and they will continue to be unless the international community steps up”.
Lammy told the conference “very simply we have got to persuade the warring parties to protect civilians to let aid in and across the country, and to put peace first”.
When asked if the UK would consider sanctioning the UAE if they continue to back the RSF, A FCDO Spokesperson said:
“The UK continues to pursue all diplomatic avenues to end the violence in Sudan – to prevent further atrocities from occurring, to press both the parties into a permanent ceasefire, to allow unrestricted humanitarian access, to protect civilians, and to commit to a peace process and transition to a civilian Government. The UK is committed to working with partners, including the UAE, to secure this.
“The Foreign Secretary is committed to pushing for peace in Sudan. He was the first ever UK Foreign Secretary to visit Adré on the Chad-Sudan border, and he is today convening Foreign Ministers at the London Sudan Conference to galvanise international efforts to end the conflict and get aid to where it is needed the most.”