Euroviews. EU should shift gears in the face of atrocities in Sudan

From the pace of the European Union's action on Sudan, no one would imagine that the country’s Darfur region is burning once again.

“Life has simply completely stopped in the city because of heavy fighting and shelling. People are hiding in their homes, scared. They cannot go out even to get necessities.”

These are the words of a volunteer in Sudan’s north Darfur town of El Fasher, desperately trying to help civilians facing intense shelling, starvation and a communications shutdown hampering real-time reporting.

Despite multiple warnings by the EU’s top diplomat, Josep Borrell, the EU response has been grossly inadequate.

It set up a new sanctions regime in October 2023. But it has only used it to sanction entities connected to the warring parties, the Sudan military and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), and is still finalising a first list of individual sanctions against those implicated in atrocities against civilians.

Despite blatant disregard for the laws of war by Sudan’s belligerents, some EU member states apparently prefer to hope that they can convince the warring parties to end the fighting rather than act to build consequential international pressure.

The situation in El Fasher comes on the heels of over a year of devastating conflict in which the competing forces have killed thousands of civilians, forced nearly 9 million people, many of them children, to flee their homes, and left millions at risk of starvation.

Both warring parties have deliberately obstructed humanitarian aid and indiscriminately shelled and bombed civilian neighbourhoods and infrastructure.

Many residential neighbourhoods have been burnt to the ground in El Fasher, apparently by the RSF and their allies.

Their actions are eerily familiar to