The U.N. rights chief said Monday that atrocities in Sudan's el-Fasher last October were a "preventable human rights catastrophe," warning that they risk being repeated in Kordofan.
Giving the U.N. Human Rights Council an update on the situation in el-Fasher, Volker Türk decried the horrific scenes after the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) unleashed a "wave of intense violence," following 18 months of brutal siege.
"Thousands of people were killed in a matter of days, and tens of thousands fled in terror," he said, stressing the need to "hold those responsible accountable, and to make sure this never happens again."
Ahead of closed-door U.N. Security Council meetings on Sudan, British deputy envoy to the U.N. James Kariuki said that "this deliberate cruelty is designed to exacerbate an already insufferable situation. Starvation must never be used as a weapon of war."
The Sudanese regular army and the RSF have been at war since April 2023, with the conflict killing tens of thousands of people, displacing millions more and triggering one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.
