General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, the head of Sudan’s military government, has stated he will not accept negotiations with the Rapid Support Forces, the paramilitary group the Sudanese government has been at war with for 9 months now.
Burhan accused the RSF of war crimes and crimes against humanity, citing these as the reason for his refusal of negotiations.
Burhan’s rejection of the potential ceasefire comes only a few days after RSF leader General Mohamad ‘Hemedti’ Hamdan Daglo met with a Sudanese civilian group and announced his willingness to sign an immediate ceasefire with the Government. It also comes as the government and RSF are supposed to sometime soon meet face to face in a meeting organized by the East African bloc, the Inter-Governmental Authority on Development (IGAD), for peace talks. The peace talks were originally set for December 28th in Djibouti, however were postponed until “early January 2024” for “technical reasons”.
No new date has been set for the IGAD meeting, despite being almost a week into January.
