The signatories said they would establish a government of ‘peace and unity’ despite concerns from human rights groups and the international community.
Sudan’s paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), accused of carrying out crimes against humanity as it fights the country’s army in a 20-month war, has signed a charter with allied political and armed groups to establish a “government of peace and unity”, its signatories said.
The signing ceremony was held behind closed doors in Kenya’s capital, Nairobi, but it was not immediately clear whether the document was signed late on Saturday or on Sunday.
The announcement comes as the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) make advances against the RSF in the country’s capital Khartoum and elsewhere, and the government is not expected to receive widespread recognition.
The RSF is also accused of carrying out ethnic cleansing and even genocide by international human rights organisations and by countries that include the United States.
The charter, however, is a sign that the splintering of Sudan is cementing, as the RSF focuses on the western region of Darfur as it loses ground elsewhere.
According to the text of the charter, the signatories agreed that Sudan should be a “secular, democratic, non-centralised state” with a single national army, though it preserved the right of armed groups to continue to exist. The war between the army and the RSF – former allies – began after a dispute over the timing of the RSF’s integration into the army.
The RSF-led charter said the government did not exist to split the country, but rather to unify it and to end the war, tasks it accused the army-aligned government operating out of Port Sudan of failing to do.
Among the signatories to the charter is Abdelaziz al-Hilu, a powerful rebel leader from Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North (SPLM-N), who controls vast swathes of territory and troops in South Kordofan state, and who has long demanded that Sudan embrace secularism.
Abdel Rahim Dagalo, deputy and brother of RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan ‘Hemedti’ Dagalo – who was notably absent – also signed.
Al-Hadi Idris, a former official and head of an armed group, said the government’s formation would be announced from inside the country in the coming days.
Government will not accept rebels’ move
The army-aligned government said it will not recognise the parallel one created by the rebel groups.
“We will not accept any other country recognising a so-called parallel government,” Sudan’s foreign minister Ali Youssef said on Sunday.
A spokesman for United Nations chief Antonio Guterres, meanwhile, warned the move could “increase the fragmentation of the country and risk making this crisis even worse”.
The charter’s signing comes as Sudan’s army on Sunday claimed that it had regained control over the city of el-Gitaina after destroying RSF units and opening the road to the city of el-Obeid, it said in a statement.
The RSF has seized most of Darfur and parts of the Kordofan region in the war, but is being pushed back from central Sudan by the Sudanese army.
The conflict has devastated the country, creating an “unprecedented” humanitarian crisis and driving half the population into hunger, with famine in multiple areas.
It has also killed more than 20,000 people and driven more than 14 million people from their homes, according to the UN. An estimated 3.2 million Sudanese have fled to neighbouring countries.
The RSF’s Hemedti was hit with sanctions by the US earlier this year.
He had previously shared power with the army and civilian politicians as part of an agreement following the ouster of President Omar al-Bashir in 2019.
The two forces ousted the civilian politicians in a 2021 coup before war erupted between them.