Amnesty calls on UN to extend Darfur arms embargo to all Sudan

Amnesty International called on the United Nations Thursday to extend the arms embargo on Darfur to cover all of Sudan, in a report on weapons flooding the war-torn country.

The 15-month war between Sudan's regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces "is being fuelled by an almost unimpeded supply of weapons into Sudan by states and corporate actors around the world", the rights watchdog said.

The new report, titled "New Weapons Fuelling the Sudan Conflict", found recently manufactured or transferred weapons from countries including Russia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Serbia, Yemen, and China were being imported and used on the battlefield.

Since it erupted in April last year, the war has killed tens of thousands of people, with some estimating the toll to be as high as 150,000, according to US envoy to Sudan Tom Perriello.

It has also uprooted over 10 million people, creating what the UN calls the world's worst displacement crisis.

"There are hundreds of thousands of weapons, millions of rounds of ammunition going into Sudan," fuelling mass human rights violations, Brian Castner, Amnesty's head of crisis research, told AFP.

The existing arms embargo, which since 2004 has applied only to Sudan's western Darfur region, "is both too narrowly focused" and "too poorly implemented to have any meaningful impact on curbing these weapons flows", the report found.

The UN Security Council must "urgently expand the arms embargo to the rest of Sudan, and also strengthen its monitoring and verification mechanisms", said Deprose Muchena, Amnesty's senior director for Regional Human Rights Impact.

Even if the Security Council – whose response to the Sudan war Amnesty has dubbed "woefully inadequate" – does not extend the embargo, "all states and corporate actors must immediately cease supplies of all arms and ammunition to Sudan", or risk violating arms treaty obligations and international humanitarian law.

Both sides of the conflict have been repeatedly accused of war crimes including deliberately targeting civilians, indiscriminate shelling of residential areas, and blocking humanitarian aid, while millions of Sudanese suffer on the brink of starvation.

According to Castner, the sheer volume of small arms entering Sudan is cause for significant alarm.

"Most people are killed by small arms. Most violations, including sexual violence and displacement, are facilitated by small arms," the veteran weapons investigator said.

"It's individual soldiers with rifles that are removing people from their homes and burning them," he continued.

On Monday, French medical charity Doctors Without Borders said that of thousands of war-wounded treated at one of its main hospitals in the Sudanese capital, 53 percent suffered gunshot wounds.