The British military is assessing a highly fraught operation to rescue some of the thousands of British nationals stranded in Sudan after the Foreign Office was deluged by cross-party criticism for missing a window of opportunity on Sunday to evacuate more than just British diplomats and their families.
An RAF plane has landed at Port Sudan in the north-east of the country with some troops to look at the option of taking nationals who have attempted to drive – some in UN-protected convoys – from Khartoum and elsewhere. The landing ship RFA Cardigan Bay and the frigate HMS Lancaster are also being lined up as options to help people out of the war-torn country as the UK desperately considers its restricted options.
It was announced on Monday evening that the two opposing forces in the civil war had agreed a three-day ceasefire.
“Following intense negotiation over the past 48 hours, the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces have agreed to implement a nationwide ceasefire starting at midnight on 24 April, to last for 72 hours,” said the US secretary of state, Antony Blinken.
There are an estimated 4,000 British nationals and dual nationals in Sudan. One British national trapped in their home told the Guardian they were not receiving any messages from the Foreign Office, describing the evacuation operation as “a shitshow”.
France has airlifted 491 people from 36 countries, including 12 EU nations, to Djibouti since Sunday, according to the foreign ministry. They included two Greeks and one Belgian who had been wounded, as well as the German and Swiss ambassadors, it said.
Two Italian military planes landed in Rome carrying 83 Italian nationals and 13 citizens of different nationalities, who had first been evacuated to Djibouti.
James Heappey, the minister for the armed forces, said in a briefing that the UK recognised “the job isn’t done” when it came to rescuing the 4,000 or more British and dual nationals trapped in Sudan.
The armed forces minister also told LBC’s Tonight With Andrew Marr show on Monday night: “The danger is that other than the very tight and controlled mission that we did Saturday into Sunday to extract the diplomats over which we had a very tight degree of control … beyond that we would effectively be inserting foreign troops, not just us, there’ll be other countries that would want to do it, into the parts of Khartoum that has been the most hotly fought over.”
Of the government’s latest discussions on the crisis, he said: “It’s not for me to tell you what decisions have been made, but obviously whatever decisions have been taken, we will now be resourcing overnight, so that once the solution is in place, if the prime minister chooses to go with it, he can then announce it.”
Heappey told Marr that any plan to deploy armed forces in Khartoum would be “unhelpful and unrealistic” but sought to assure “a number of other options” were discussed in Rishi Sunak’s emergency Cobra meeting on Monday.
A minister who attended the government’s Cobra meeting on Monday evening said there was “no current plan” for evacuation of British citizens from Sudan.
Andrew Mitchell MP told Channel 4 News: “The Foreign Office’s messaging has been absolutely consistent throughout. We have said that there is no current plan for evacuation and we are working on finding a plan.”
Mitchell, under pressure from his own backbenchers in the Commons earlier in the day, added that the UK was not following the US policy of rescuing only its diplomatic staff.
The minister for development and Africa said the UK government’s advice to nationals had changed from “stay at home” to asking them to exercise their own judgment on whether to flee – but those who do so will be acting at their own risk.
Mitchell did not deny that the UK ambassador, Giles Lever, and his wife, the deputy ambassador, had both been out of the county since 14 April. He insisted the development director had been in post, and that the UK, as the pen-holder for Sudan at the UN, had not been caught flatfooted by the speed with which the crisis had escalated.
There were also reports that even during the period the UK was advising residents to shelter in their homes, UK diplomatic staff were attaching themselves to UN convoys leaving Khartoum, ignoring the official advice from their own employers.
The violence in Sudan has pitted army units loyal to its military ruler, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against the Rapid Support Forces, led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. Battles have been raging in Khartoum and its twin city of Omdurman, and a series of ceasefires have failed to hold.
In the Commons, Mitchell was repeatedly challenged to explain how other countries had evacuated their nationals, and whether the UK had wasted a window of opportunity to extract large numbers on Sunday, during a brief lull in the fighting.
The French foreign ministry had reported that after meetings between emissaries of the two warring camps in Abu Dhabi, calls from around the world and strong advice from Saudi diplomacy and the presidency of South Sudan, the two rivals left a brief space on Sunday to allow the various evacuation plans to be put in place. It is not clear whether a second pause can be negotiated.
Callout
The Foreign Office points out is that it is dealing with a larger number of nationals than most other countries, and in the case of France, one special forces soldier was shot and is gravely ill.
But Alicia Kearns, the Conservative chair of the foreign affairs select committee, said time was running out, while Labour warned that the UK’s handling of the crisis suggested the Foreign Office had learned nothing from the Afghanistan fiasco.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, warned that the violence in Sudan “risks a catastrophic conflagration within Sudan that could engulf the whole region and beyond” and called on security council members to exert maximum leverage.
Heappey said Sunday’s rescue involving two RAF planes – an Airbus A400M and a Hercules C-130 – operating via the Akrotiri base in Cyprus “went without a hitch”. Planes landed at an airfield at Wadi Seidna, which is about 30km north of Khartoum, and the UK worked with France and Germany to fly in and out this weekend.
Asked why diplomats but not citizens had been evacuated, Mitchell said: “We have a specific duty of care – a legal duty of care – to our own staff and our diplomats.” He added that there had been “a very specific threat to the diplomatic community” in Khartoum.
Eiman Bribo, who was visiting her extended Sudanese family with her husband and two children from Swansea, said she believed the UK had discriminated in not taking all nationals. “We are all citizens of the UK, but they took the ones they believe are more important and they are first-class citizens, and left us who are second-class citizens behind.”
She said she had chosen not to leave Khartoum with her Sudanese relatives because she believed her family would be evacuated by the UK.
Tobias Ellwood, the chair of the Commons defence committee, called for a “clearcut plan” to get British passport holders out. “If that plan does not emerge today, then individuals will then lose faith and then start making their own way back,” he told GB News, saying that could lead to “some very difficult situations”.
Some Sudanese people have expressed anger that western countries have seemingly prioritised evacuating their people over trying to stop the fighting.
Speaking after the announced ceasefire, the former British diplomat Dame Rosalind Marsden told the BBC’s Newsnight: “Over the last 48 hours there’s been enough of a brief lull in the fighting to allow diplomats and other foreign nationals to get out, so let’s hope that this latest announcement means it’s going to be possible to build on that, and of course move forward to try to negotiate a more permanent cessation.”
