Sudan has rejected a call by United Nations experts for the deployment of an "independent and impartial force" to protect millions of civilians driven from their homes by more than a year of war.
Since April 2023, the conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and triggered one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
The conflict pits the national army led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan against the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces of his former deputy, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo.
A UN fact-finding mission said Friday its probe had uncovered "harrowing" violations by both sides and called for "an independent and impartial force with a mandate to safeguard civilians" to be urgently deployed.
But the Sudanese foreign ministry, which is loyal to the army under al-Burhan, said in a statement late Saturday that "the Sudanese government rejects in their entirety the recommendations of the UN mission".
It called the UN Human Rights Council, which created the fact-finding mission last year, "a political and illegal body", and the panel's recommendations "a flagrant violation of their mandate".
UN mission calls for peacekeeping force in Sudan, suspects war crimes
Little use?
The statement accused the Rapid Support Forces of "systematically targeting civilians and civilian institutions".
"The protection of civilians remains an absolute priority for the Sudanese government," it said.
It also rejected the experts' call for an arms embargo.
Horn of Africa expert Roland Marchal told RFI he was sceptical a peacekeeping force would be of much help when the two sides of the conflict are not even in talks.
Any new force would spend "much more time defending itself from threats it will face" than effectively protecting civilians, he argued.
'Nightmare'
The UN experts said eight million civilians have been displaced and another two million people have fled to neighbouring countries, while more than half the population faces food shortages.
On a visit to Sudan on Sunday, World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said: "The scale of the emergency is shocking, as is the insufficient action being taken to curtail the conflict and respond to the suffering it is causing."
In Port Sudan, where government and UN offices have relocated due to the intense fighting in the capital Khartoum, Tedros called on the "world to wake up and help Sudan out of the nightmare it is living through".
Famine and floods add to distress of Sudanese displaced by war
(with AFP)
