"Where Africa Comes to Stay Informed."
US Edition
"Where Africa Comes to Stay Informed."
Sudan has appealed to the United Nations for help after the United States held back an entry visa for army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, days before he is due to speak at the General Assembly. The request came in a letter from Sudan’s ambassador to the world body asking the organization to step in.
A Sudanese diplomatic source and a Western analyst with access to both American and Sudanese officials say the visa has been tied to one demand: that Burhan put his name to a 90-day halt in fighting drawn up by Massad Boulos, the senior US adviser on Arab and African affairs. Khartoum’s military had already voiced objections to that plan over the summer. Neither the US State Department nor Sudanese officials answered requests for comment.
Dated September 21 and sent to Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, the letter from Ambassador Al-Harith Idriss Al-Harith calls for the UN’s “immediate intervention” with American authorities so the travel document is granted. “Should this situation persist, it would effectively prevent the Head of State of a Member State of the United Nations from participating in person in the work of the General Assembly,” it reads.
UN spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric told Reuters: “The Secretary-General is deeply concerned that a visa has reportedly not yet been issued to the President of the Transitional Sovereign Council of the Sudan.” He added: “The Secretariat immediately raised the matter with the United States authorities and continues to engage with them.” Washington’s host-country arrangement for the UN headquarters bars it from refusing visas, although it has previously turned away the Palestinian Authority’s leader.
Burhan has run Sudan in practice since 2019 as commander of its armed forces, but lost formal recognition from the African Union and Western capitals after the 2021 coup he staged against the civilian government alongside Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who leads the Rapid Support Forces. Even so, he has continued to represent Sudan from the General Assembly podium in the years since, and is scheduled to address it again on Thursday.
The standoff marks the worst stretch between Washington and the Sudanese military since fighting erupted between the army and the RSF in April 2023. Tension had already built over an American push to widen an arms embargo — currently limited to Darfur, where the RSF is strongest — to cover the whole country, which Burhan’s allies argue would hit the army hardest.
Writing in the American magazine Foreign Policy on Monday, Burhan rejected the idea of taking instructions from outside on how the war should end, arguing that earlier lulls in combat simply gave the RSF and its foreign supporters time to rebuild. “Ceasefires have collapsed over the course of this war because they were written about Sudan without Sudan,” he wrote.
The UN describes the conflict as the largest humanitarian emergency anywhere in the world. Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, has installed a competing administration that has yet to win meaningful recognition. American mediation has run through the “Quad” grouping of the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Saudi Arabia — the states judged to carry the most weight in Sudan. Meanwhile Abdalla Hamdok, the civilian prime minister ousted in the coup, is in New York for the Assembly this week with members of his anti-war coalition.
Comments
0