ICC Prosecutor Urges World to 'Stem the Bleeding' in Sudan Before Region Spins Out of Control
NEW YORK CITY: Violence in Sudan has continued to escalate over the past six months, the International Criminal Court prosecutor said Monday, with reports of rape, crimes against children and widespread persecution.
“Terror has become a common currency,” Karim Khan told a meeting of the United Nations Security Council, “and the terror is felt not by the people with guns, but by the people who are fleeing, very often with nothing on their feet, hungry.”
The war between rival military factions has been raging in Sudan for more than a year. Since it began in April 2023, some 19,000 people have been killed. More than 10 million are displaced within the country and more than 2 million have fled to neighboring countries as refugees, making it the world's largest displacement crisis.
The country is on the brink of famine due to a severe food crisis looming, with many families reportedly already going days without food.
Khan said the ICC is prioritizing investigations into allegations of crimes against and affecting children, and gender-based crimes. These “serious human rights violations, mass violations of personal dignity” continue to be fueled by “the provision of weapons, financial support from various sectors and political triangulations that lead to inaction by the international community,” he added.
His comments were made during the Security Council’s latest biannual briefing on the court’s work on Darfur. Nearly 20 years after the council referred the situation in Darfur to the ICC, arrest warrants issued by the court against former President Omar Al-Bashir, former ministers Ahmad Mohammed Harun and Abdel Raheem Mohammed Hussein, and former commander-in-chief of the Justice and Equality Movement, Abdallah Banda Abakaer Nourain, remain outstanding.
Khan said such failures to execute arrest warrants for indicted individuals have contributed to several unintended consequences, including “the climate of impunity and the outbreak of violence that began in April (2023) and continues to this day, (in which) belligerents think they can get away with murder and rape; the sense that the bandwidth of the (Security) Council, the bandwidth of states, is too limited, too preoccupied with other epicenters of conflict, hot wars in other parts of the world; that we have lost sight of the plight of the people of Darfur, that we have somehow forgotten our responsibilities under the United Nations Charter; (and) the sense that Darfur or Sudan is a lawless zone where people can act recklessly, based on their worst inclinations, their worst base instincts, the politics of hate and power, the opportunities for profit.”
He called on council members to “substantially support” the call for justice.
In comments directed at both sides of the war, the Sudan Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, as well as “those who finance them, supply them with weapons, give them orders, obtain certain advantages,” Khan said his office was investigating and “using our resources as effectively as possible to ensure that the events that have taken place since April last year are subject to the principle of international humanitarian law and the imperative that every human life must be considered of equal value.”
He said that after “many difficulties”, Sudanese authorities were finally cooperating with ICC investigators who managed to enter Port Sudan, collect evidence and interact with General Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan, commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces and the country's de facto leader.
“But one swallow does not make a summer,” Khan added, stressing the need for “continued and in-depth cooperation with the Sudanese Armed Forces, with General Al-Burhan and his government moving forward.”
He said that “one concrete way in which this commitment to accountability and this lack of tolerance for impunity can be demonstrated is through the proper implementation of court orders,” including the arrest of former minister Harun and his surrender to court.
However, Khan said that more recent significant efforts to engage the leadership of the Rapid Support Forces have so far proved unsuccessful.
Meanwhile, he said, ICC investigators have visited neighboring Chad several times and collected “very valuable testimonial evidence” from displaced Sudanese citizens living there as refugees.
They met with representatives of Sudanese civil society in Chad, South Sudan, the Central African Republic and Europe, he added, “to collect and preserve their accounts and their stories, to analyse them and piece them together, to see what crimes, if any, they show and who is responsible for the hell on earth that is being unleashed so stubbornly, so persistently against the people of Darfur.”
Khan said his office has used technological tools to collect and collate various forms of evidence from phones, videos and audio recordings, and that this is “proving extremely critical in piercing the veil of impunity.”
The joint efforts of investigators, analysts, lawyers and members of civil society have led to significant progress, he added, and expressed hope that he would soon be able to announce that arrest warrants had been requested for individuals believed to be primarily responsible for crimes in the country.
Meanwhile, Khan sounded a broader warning about what he described as “a trapezoid of chaos in that part of the continent.”
He continued: “If you draw a line from the Mediterranean of Libya, all the way to the Red Sea of Sudan, and then you draw a line to sub-Saharan Africa, and then to the Atlantic, with Boko Haram causing instability and chaos and suffering in Nigeria, and then you come back to Sudan, (we) see the map and the countries that are at risk of being disrupted or destabilized by this concentration of chaos and suffering.”
He warned Security Council members that, in addition to concerns about the rights of the Darfuri people, “we are reaching a turning point where the Pandora's box of ethnic, racial, religious, sectarian (and) commercial interests will be released.”
He added that “they will no longer be susceptible to the political powers of the great states of the world, or even of this council. Concrete action is now needed to stem the bleeding… in Sudan.”
