U.S.-led talks to end the war in Sudan, held in a private Swiss ski resort, ended after 10 days on Friday with agreements to deliver food and medicine to millions of starving Sudanese in the country’s most famine-stricken areas.
But mediators failed to broker a ceasefire, or even bring the two sides to the negotiating table, after the Sudanese army refused to attend. Frustrated US and Arab diplomats said the collapse exposed the chaos and internal divisions in Sudan’s weak military, a major obstacle to ending Africa’s biggest war.
The United States had hoped the talks in Villars-sur-Olon, a picturesque village 80 miles from Geneva by road, would break an eight-month diplomatic stalemate. The army and its rival, the Rapid Support Forces, or RSF, have not held direct talks since January. Since then, the war has spread, leading to a widespread humanitarian crisis that this month led to a rare famine declaration.
Diplomats from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Switzerland attended the talks in a closed area inside a hotel occupied by unsuspecting tourists. Representatives from the African Union and the United Nations also attended.
The Royal Swiss Armed Forces sent a delegation hosted by the Swiss in a lakeside town 25 miles away.
At some point this week, Tom Perriello, the US envoy to Sudan, broke away from the talks and travelled to Cairo to meet with an official Sudanese delegation, hoping to persuade its members to attend. But the Sudanese sent delegates that the Americans and Egyptians believed were not interested in peace. Egypt’s intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, who brokered the meeting, cancelled the meeting at the last minute, according to two officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.
The meeting was cancelled because the Sudanese ‘broke protocols’, Mr. Brillo said on Channel X.
‘Every time Sudan’s military commander, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, takes steps towards peace, he faces an immediate backlash from political forces in his coalition who have nefarious reasons to extend this war,’ Mr Brillo said in an interview on Friday. ’They need this war, with all its unimaginable suffering, so that they can regain power that the Sudanese people will never willingly give them.
The army did not immediately respond to questions about the negotiations. It said earlier that it would not attend if the United Arab Emirates, which supports the Royal Saudi Armed Forces, was there.
With ceasefire talks off the table, mediators have moved on to humanitarian issues. Although some are on opposite sides of the war – Egypt has traditionally backed the Sudanese army, while the Emiratis back the RSF – several diplomats said they put aside their political differences and worked together to negotiate concessions from both sides on humanitarian access.
Sudan’s military, accused of withholding food aid from its starving population, announced it would reopen the main border crossing with Chad, which he closed for six months to UN relief trucks.
Pushing for a ceasefire: The US has opened new peace talks aimed at ending Sudan’s disastrous civil war, driven by a growing sense of urgency to stop the country’s worsening famine, which threatens the lives of millions and could become the world’s worst in decades.
‘We need to get the trucks in now. We need to get medical supplies in now,’ said Lana Nusseibeh, former UAE ambassador to the United Nations. ‘It is this urgency that is driving everyone to be here.’
Mr. Brillo said the group had secured assurances from both sides to allow unfettered humanitarian access to two key arteries: The main border crossing with Chad, which has been closed since February, and the main road to the Zamzam camp for displaced people in the Darfur region. A famine was declared in Zamzam on 1 August, the first of its kind in the world in four years.
Michel O’Lacaretti of Doctors Without Borders, one of the few aid organizations working in Zamzam, welcomed the news, saying there was ‘no time to waste’ in increasing aid and ‘translating declarations into action on the ground’.
But even those gains have not been immediate. By Thursday, 16 UN trucks had crossed the western border into Sudan from Chad, raising hopes that it could be the start of a flood of famine relief into Darfur. About 100 more lorries were waiting at the border.
But then the Sudanese government body that coordinates humanitarian aid ordered the trucks to stop moving, apparently cancelling an earlier order issued at the request of the military.
Talks were underway on Friday to resolve the blockage. But officials said the order appeared to symbolize wider divisions within Sudan’s military government. Islamists loyal to ousted President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was ousted in 2019, have grown stronger in the past nine months as the Sudanese military has suffered a series of battlefield defeats.
This in turn has weakened the authority of the military ruler, General al-Burhan, who in his desperate search for weapons has turned to new sources, including Iran, the Houthis in Yemen and Russia, according to officials.
The chaos in the army provided an easy win for the RSF, whose delegation spent much of the past two weeks in the lakeside town of Fifi, where it met with diplomats and made pledges to rein in militants.
The delegation included Goni Hamdan, who accused the army of manipulation and said its reluctance to talk about peace reflected its weak position on the ground: ‘They once ruled Sudan,’ he said. ‘They had their chance. ‘Now they are finished.’
During the talks, the drumbeat of ongoing violence in Sudan served as a reminder of the stakes in the escalating war. The Sudanese army bombed a hospital in the Darfur town of El Diein, killing at least 15 people, local media reported, and the Sudanese armed forces bombed a warehouse belonging to an international aid organization in El Fasher.
