The UN Security Council has given members one month to consider a US proposal to expand the arms embargo across Sudan, after agreeing to extend the existing restrictions for 30 days.
Washington pushed for the short-term extension to allow further negotiations to widen the embargo, rather than simply renewing the existing sanctions regime for another year.
US representative Jeffrey Bartos said a long-term technical rollover “is not an option”, noting that during negotiations some council members had voiced “emphatic support” for expanding the arms embargo to the entire territory of Sudan, while others wanted to maintain the status quo.
The US therefore proposed the one-month extension to provide the “time and space necessary” to negotiate substantive changes to the sanctions regime.
The UK backed efforts to strengthen the sanctions regime and welcomed the additional time for negotiations. Russia, however, firmly rejected expanding the arms embargo beyond Sudan's Darfur region.
The US has been stepping up pressure for a UN arms embargo covering all of Sudan, saying that cutting off weapons and foreign support to the country's warring parties is essential to ending the civil war.
The war has killed tens of thousands of people, displaced millions and created one of the world's largest humanitarian crises, with an estimated 20 million people suffering from hunger. Yet Sudanese Armed Forces leader Gen Abdel Fattah Al Burhan has vowed to continue fighting until the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces is defeated, rejecting repeated attempts by the US and regional powers to broker a ceasefire. Both forces have been accused of grave abuses during the war.
Michael Waltz, US ambassador to the UN, and Massad Boulos, senior adviser to President Donald Trump for Arab and African affairs, made the case for the measure in an opinion piece published in Foreign Policy this month, saying the Security Council has an opportunity to curb the flow of weapons that has helped sustain Sudan's civil war.
The US officials' intervention came after a UN independent fact-finding mission warned that foreign arms, military technology, fighters and logistical networks are strengthening both sides of the conflict and enabling increasingly sophisticated attacks against civilians.
It said its investigation into the SAF found evidence that foreign-supplied combat drones and loitering munitions – which can hover over an area before striking a target – had expanded its long-range strike capabilities. It said some of those weapons were used in attacks on civilian sites.
In the same week, reports published by The New York Times and The Washington Post revealed the SAF has not only used chemical weapons in the devastating war but also built a secret stockpile that it later sought to conceal. A dossier of evidence detailed how the SAF tested bombs in Sudan’s desert and built up its chemical weapons operation piece by piece before attempting to cover its tracks.
