UN mission says both Sudan sides committed abuses, peacekeepers needed

By Emma Farge

GENEVA (Reuters) -Both sides in Sudan's civil war have committed abuses that may amount to war crimes, and world powers need to send in peacekeepers and widen an arms embargo to protect civilians, a U.N.-mandated mission said on Friday.

Sudan's army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have both raped and attacked civilians, used torture and made arbitrary arrests, according to the report that said it was based on 182 interviews with survivors, relatives and witnesses.

"The gravity of our findings and failure of the warring parties to protect civilians underscores the need for urgent and immediate intervention," the U.N. fact-finding mission's chair, Mohamed Chande Othman, told reporters.

Both sides have dismissed past accusations from the U.S. and rights groups, and have accused each other of carrying out abuses. Neither immediately responded to requests for comment on Friday, or released a statement in response to the report.

Othman and the two other mission members called for an independent force to be deployed without delay.

"We cannot continue to have people dying before our eyes and do nothing about it," mission member Mona Rishmawi said. A U.N.-mandated peacekeeping force was a possibility, she added.

The mission called for the expansion of an existing U.N. arms embargo that currently applies only to the western region of Darfur where thousands of ethnic killings have been reported. The war that started in Khartoum in April last year has spread to 14 of the country's 18 states.

HUNDREDS OF RAPES REPORTED

The mission said it had also found reasonable grounds to believe the RSF and its allied militias had committed additional war crimes including the abduction of women who were forced into sexual slavery and the recruitment of child soldiers.

Mission member Joy Ngozi Ezeilo said unnamed support groups had received reports of more than 400 rapes in the first year of the war, but the real number was probably much higher.

"The rare brutality of this war will have a devastating and long-lasting psychological impact on children," she said.

The fact-finding team said it had tried to contact Sudanese authorities on multiple occasions but received no answer. It said the RSF had asked to cooperate with the mission, without elaborating.

The conflict began when competition between the army and the RSF, which had previously shared power after staging a coup, flared into open warfare.

Civilians in Sudan are facing worsening famine, mass displacement and disease after 17 months of war, aid agencies say.

U.S.-led mediators said last month that they had secured guarantees from both parties at talks in Switzerland to improve access for humanitarian aid, but that the Sudanese army's absence from the discussions had hindered progress.

"We will continue to push all parties to come to a negotiated settlement that allows the Sudanese people to shape their political future," White House spokesperson Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters on Friday, reiterating the Biden administration's condemnation of the violence.

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 Britain will call for the U.N. mission's renewal at a meeting this month, with diplomats expecting opposition from Sudan which says the war is an internal affair.

(Reporting by Emma Farge in GenevaAdditional reporting by Aidan Lewis in Cairo; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Matthew Lewis)