The UN Special Advisor on the Prevention of Genocide, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, on Wednesday briefed the Security Council in New York on the ongoing armed conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in Sudan. She raised the alarm, saying that the situation “bears all the marks of risk of genocide, with strong allegations that this crime has already been committed”.

In her briefing, Wairimu Nderitu refers to her concerns about the continuing violence against civilians in Sudan, she raised in the last twenty months “through seven public statements”, in particular on the situation in Darfur, Kordofan, Blue Nile region, and El Gezira.

On Wednesday, her message was even more clear: “I would like today to raise my alarm, in a clear and unequivocal way, about the ongoing situation in Sudan.

“This situation today bears all the marks of risk of genocide, with strong allegations that this crime has already been committed. Civilians are far from protected. Civilian populations are targeted on the basis of identity. In Darfur and El Fasher, civilians are being attacked and killed because of the colour of their skin, because of their ethnicity, because of who they are. They are also targeted with hate speech and with direct incitement to violence.”

She laments that the violence is not new. “In Darfur, the same groups of people were targeted on the basis of their ethnicity, twenty years ago. In Chad, I saw the refugee camps they escaped to, side by side, one camp twenty years old and the other camp just some months old. The conflict has exacerbated the pre-existing ethnic divisions, encouraging more ethnically tribally motivated killings, particularly in Darfur.”