United
Nations – A United Nations (UN) panel said on Monday it had no “credible
evidence” of Sudanese paramilitaries fighting in conflict-wracked Libya
for military strongman Khalifa Haftar as alleged by some media outlets.
Several Libyan and regional media
outlets had claimed in recent months that hundreds of Sudanese paramilitaries
from the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) were deployed in Libya to fight alongside
Haftar’s Libyan Arab Armed Forces.
But a UN panel of experts on
Sudan dismissed these claims in a report released on Monday.
“The panel has no credible
evidence of the presence of Rapid Support Forces in Libya,” the report
said.
It said there were, however, many
Arabs from Sudan’s conflict-wracked region of Darfur and neighbouring Chad
fighting as “individual mercenaries” in Libya and they belonged to
the same tribes that made up a majority of RSF personnel.
The UN experts’ report also said
several Darfuri armed groups operating in Libya “have participated in
various clashes and military operations alongside Libyan warring parties”.
Libya has been mired in chaos
since a 2011 NATO-backed uprising that killed long-time dictator Muammar
Gaddafi, with the main cleavage nowadays pitting Haftar’s LAAF against a UN-recognised
government in Tripoli.
Strengthened ‘military
capability’
The
deputy of Sudan’s ruling transitional sovereign council, General Mohamed Hamdan
Daglo, heads the feared RSF which has long been accused by human rights groups
of committing widespread abuses in Sudan’s Darfur provinces.
The
report said Darfur itself did not see any large-scale outbreak of violence
during the reporting period – March to December 2019 – although the region saw
intercommunal skirmishes, militia attacks on civilians and tensions in major
camps housing people displaced by the conflict.
It said that a main rebel group
in Darfur, the Sudan Liberation Army-Abdul Wahid group, has strengthened its
military capability after its revenues increased following the discovery of a
gold mine in an area it controls.
“The movement has been able
to strengthen its military capability by acquiring new weapons and ammunition
from local militias and engaging in a recruitment drive,” the report said.
The group fought Sudanese
government forces for years during the regime of Omar al-Bashir, who was deposed
during street protests in April last year.
The conflict in Darfur erupted in
2003, when non-Arab rebels took up arms against Bashir’s Arab-dominated regime,
whom they accused of marginalising the region.
The conflict left at least 300 000
people dead and displaced 2.5 million others, the UN says.
The SLA-Abdul Wahid group has not
participated in ongoing peace talks with Sudan’s new transitional government, which
is negotiating with several other rebel groups in a bid to achieve a peace deal
to end wars in Darfur, as well as Blue Nile and South Kordofan states.