The UK should impose sanctions on human rights abusers in senior Sudanese military positions as well as designate the Wagner group operating in Sudan as a terrorist group, a report from the all-party group on Sudan has urged.
The group, including the Conservative former Africa minister Vicky Ford, said on Wednesday the west has allowed impunity to become the norm, and the failure to bring to justice many of those responsible for the genocide in Darfur 20 years ago has allowed the same militia to regroup and form part of the forces now blocking democracy in the country.
The report also warned that the major outbreak of fighting combined with displacements in Darfur would mean more refugees “will inevitably be coming the UK’s way from Sudan”. Sudanese refugees were already in the top five nations coming to the UK by boat.
The overall thrust of the report, chaired by the independent peer Lord Alton, is the long-term failure of the international community to do enough to support the work of the international criminal court to bring perpetrators of genocide to justice in Sudan, so emboldening the perpetrators of the current violence. Alton visited Darfur in 2004 to highlight the scale of the atrocities , and believes an increase in killings in Darfur in the past two years has been left unpunished.
The new inquiry, undertaken just before the latest violence escalated in Khartoum, took evidence from many serving British diplomats, as well as the first prosecutor of the international criminal court, Luis Ocampo, an Argentine lawyer.
After the ICC investigation, the then Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in 2010 became the first sitting president to be indicted by the ICC, and the first person to be charged by the ICC for the crime of genocide. Ocampo told the all-party group there had been no political will to arrest Al-Bashir, now in a military hospital in Khartoum, and if he had been arrested it might have acted as a deterrent to Vladimir Putin committing war crimes in Ukraine. “The attention of the international community is normally lost very soon and very fast,” Ocampo told the inquiry.
Bashir was moved from prison with at least five former members of his regime, including Abdel Rahim Mohammed Hussein, who is also wanted for war crimes.
The presence of the Wagner group in Sudan, the inquiry found, is entirely malign, and designed to secure three main objectives – de-democratisation, the export of Sudanese gold to the Russian war machine, and the construction of a Russian-controlled naval port or naval logistic facility.
Alton said: “The Darfur genocide of 20 years ago was met with startling impunity – an impunity which is now among the many factors causing and driving further atrocities and further displacement. Without justice there can’t be peace, without peace there can’t be meaningful development on hope-filled lives.
“Last year in the first six months almost half a million more people in Darfur joined the ranks of the 100 million people displaced globally. This continuing violence in Darfur has gone largely unreported.”
He added: “There did appear for a tantalising moment to be a glimpse of hope in Sudan, a possibility that the warlords would retreat to the barracks and allow young technocrats, doctors, engineers, and others to help democracy flourish in the country.” Those hopes have been dashed in recent weeks.
He said: “The Sudanese army is fighting against the Rapid Support Forces [RSF], but it too has been contaminated in the past by support for a radical ideology and which led them to play a very significant part in the killing of millions of civilians.” The two generals leading the army and the RSF had coexisted in partnership for more than three years due to their mutual interest in maintaining power and slowing Sudan’s transition to civilian government.
Dr Rosalind Marsden, the former UK ambassador to Sudan, questioned whether the UK had acted at a high enough level at the critical moment to deter the threat to the timetable for a new democratic transition mapped out in the December 2022 agreement, signed by military leaders and 40 civilian groups. The agreement was designed to reverse the damage of the 2021 coup, and by April lead to the integration of the RSF into the Sudanese army.
She told the foreign affairs select committee: “What we are seeing at the moment is of course a power struggle between two generals, but it is also an attempt to derail Sudan’s democratic transition and to return Sudan to the control to the former regime. This is the point being made very strongly by Sudan’s pro-democracy civilian leadership.
“They have been warning the international community for quite some time that elements of the old regime were trying to widen the rift between the army and the Rapid Support Forces to destabilise the transition process. The point has to be understood by international governments, including the UK.”
Echoing points she made in a 28 March Chatham House paper, she said during Ramadan members of the former ruling party called for the release of President Bashir from prison and were mobilising their members. “The British government and its partners perhaps should have taken those warnings more seriously. As always with this kind of political process it is the last stages that are the most dangerous where the spoilers are likely to step up their efforts. Again there were warnings that this might be the case.
“High level political intervention was needed at that critical moment to increase the pressure on the two military leaders, and how long it should take to integrate RSF into the army”. She said she did not know if any British ministers picked up the phone at this crucial window. “Now the war has broken out there is high level attention from the British government, but in a way that is necessary sometimes when you are at a critical stage of a process and perhaps that is where more could have been done.”
Andrew Mitchell, the development minister, denied that the government had paid insufficient attention saying “we were watching very closely over the peace process”, adding “we would not have expected these two generals would have slugged it out in this way on a totally non-ideological issue”.
