Sudan rejects Kenya-led peace mission
Sudan’s government has rejected Kenya’s leadership of a crisis committee tasked with mediating in the country’s two-month-long conflict, which the World Health Organization says has killed at least 866 people and injured thousands.
In a statement on Thursday, the Sudanese Foreign Ministry accused Nairobi of lacking neutrality and taking the side of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) fighting the country’s army.
Kenyan President William Ruto was appointed chairman of a mediation delegation of the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD), made up of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Sudan.
Following his appointment, Ruto said his government was committed to meeting Khartoum’s warring parties “face to face” in order to find a “lasting solution to the crisis.”
However, the Sudanese military-led Sovereign Council said it won’t accept Ruto’s chairmanship because “statements of senior Kenyan officials and the behavior of its government confirmed that it adopts the positions of Rapid Support Forces (RSF), shelters its members, and provides them with various types of support.”
The ministry said the government has informed the IGAD of its position.
Kenya’s Foreign Affairs Principal Secretary Abraham Korir Sing’Oei said his country had received no official communication from Khartoum regarding the issue.
He added that the appointment of Kenya’s president to lead the team “was arrived at by the IGAD summit and can only be vacated by the summit.”
The leaders of the IGAD quartet are scheduled to meet with the commander of the Sudanese Armed Forces, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the leader of the RSF, General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, in the coming days in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.
The goal of the meeting is to establish safe passage for humanitarian aid delivery to war-affected areas in Khartoum and Darfur, as well as to initiate an all-encompassing political procedure aimed at resolving the armed conflict that erupted on April 15.
