Sudan slams Kenya for providing platform for RSF to announce government

The Sudanese government has accused Kenya of violating Sudan’s sovereignty by hosting an event during which the Rapid Support Forces militia (RSF) is expected to announce a parallel government on Friday. The event was originally scheduled to be held on Tuesday at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre in Nairobi, but was postponed until Friday.

RSF sources told AFP that the paramilitary group, which has been fighting against the Sudanese army for nearly two years, is preparing to declare a government in territories under its control in an event held in Nairobi tomorrow.

The foreign ministry in the Sudanese government allied with army head Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan condemned Kenya for allowing the event to be hosted. In a statement issued late on Tuesday, the ministry said that this “promotes the dismembering of African states, violates their sovereignty and interferes in their internal affairs in violation of the UN Charter, the African Union’s Constitutive Act and the rules established by the modern international system.”

Kenyan President William Ruto has also faced widespread criticism at home. “What Ruto is doing is a reckless abandonment of the traditional caution and dignified approach of Kenyan diplomacy,” former secretary-general of UN Trade and Development and Kenyan politician Mukhisa Kituyi told AFP. “[He is] trying to legitimise a criminal gang that has been dismembering people. This is criminally irresponsible.”

Since mid-April 2023, the war between the army and the RSF has killed tens of thousands, displaced more than 12 million people and created the world’s largest humanitarian crisis. While the army controls eastern and northern Sudan, the RSF controls almost all of the Darfur region and large areas of the south.

In recent weeks, the army has led an offensive in central Sudan, regaining control over major cities and almost all of the capital Khartoum.

The RSF’s decision to sign a pact with allied political factions and declare a government in the territory it controls comes as it seeks to establish its grip on Darfur, effectively partitioning Sudan.

Both the Sudanese army and the RSF have been accused of war crimes. The RSF in particular has been accused of carrying out mass executions on grounds of ethnicity, sexual violence and human rights abuses in areas under its control.

In January, the US imposed sanctions on the commander of the RSF, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, and later Burhan, for war crimes.

The Sudanese foreign ministry told Kenya that embracing the militia leaders and allowing them to engage in political activity and public propaganda, while the militia continues to commit genocide and massacres against civilians on an ethnic basis, and attack displacement camps, is both encouragement for and complicity in all such atrocities.

READ: Sudan accuses rebel faction of killing 433 civilians in White Nile State