U.N. Panel Calls for International Force in Sudan to Protect Civilians

Europe|U.N. Panel Calls for International Peacekeeping Force in Sudan

A United Nations fact-finding mission on Friday called for an international peacekeeping force to protect civilians in Sudan, where a brutal civil war has caused the world’s largest displacement crisis, leaving millions of people homeless and starving.

Both sides in the 17-month conflict — the Sudanese army and its rival, the Rapid Support Forces paramilitaries — have killed, mutilated and tortured people, including children, the three-person mission said in a report that they will present next week to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva.

“Given the failure of the warring parties to spare civilians, it is imperative that an independent and impartial force with a mandate to safeguard civilians be deployed without delay,” Mohamed Chande Othman, the panel’s chairman and a former chief justice of Tanzania said Friday in a news conference releasing the report.

The war in Sudan, a giant nation on the Red Sea in Africa’s northeast, has threatened to destabilize its neighbors, and has drawn in other countries. The United Arab Emirates has been supplying weapons to the Rapid Support Forces, though it has denied doing so. Egypt is a longtime supporter of the Sudanese army.

“Fighting will stop once the arms flow stops,” the report says. The panel warned that states supplying arms could find themselves complicit in international war crimes.

The panel urged the U.N. Security Council to expand a longstanding embargo on supplies of weapons to the Darfur region, in the west, to cover the whole country.