The UN Security Council voted Wednesday to extend for another year the sanctions regime that has targeted Sudan and the Darfur conflict since 2005, but Russia and China abstained.
According to the new resolution 2676, the Council “decided to extend until 12 March 2024 the mandate of the panel of experts originally appointed under resolution 1591 of 2005 and previously extended” by a number of successive texts voted against Sudan over the past 18 years, with 13 votes in favour and two abstentions.
The UN Security Council has tasked these expert panels with monitoring the implementation of arms embargoes and economic sanctions imposed on a number of countries in crisis or conflict.
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Russia abstained from the vote on Wednesday and its Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who was in Khartoum in early February, said he supported Sudan’s call to lift the UN sanctions. He also defended the operations of the paramilitary group Wagner in Africa in the face of the “terrorist” threat.
His deputy ambassador to the United Nations, Dmitri Polianski, accused “the United States of having decided to force a vote on the text” and considered it “unacceptable that the Security Council sanctions be used as punitive measures.
Similarly, the representative of China, Geng Shuang, abstained because these “sanctions are outdated and should be lifted in light of the improvement of conditions on the ground” in Darfur.
Sudan is under a series of sanctions and an arms embargo imposed in 2005 by the UN during the conflict in Darfur, in the west.
The economy of this large East African country, one of the world’s poorest, has been rendered bloodless by years of U.S. economic sanctions under Omar al-Bashir.
The post-Bashir democratic transition offered hope: in 2020, Washington removed Sudan from its list of state sponsors of terrorism and international aid returned — $2 billion annually.
But the October 25, 2021 coup led by army chief General Abdel Fattah el-Burhane interrupted that transition and the flow of aid, which will only resume if civilians regain power, donors warn.
