By Wambi Michael
KAMPALA, May 21 2025 – Political instability and conflicts in the Great Lakes, the Horn of Africa, Sudan, and South Sudan have led to massive displacements and civilian suffering, and because the whole region is in crisis, the civilian population has few places to find refuge.

In the Great Lakes, Africa faces its most severe political crisis in more than 20 years; the M23 crisis in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has displaced more than 3.7 million people—many of them for the second time.

Recently, researchers and humanitarian workers have reported at various forums that civilians caught in the middle of this conflict are facing a humanitarian crisis.

“We have faced unprecedented atrocities. There has been mass rape of women in Khartoum, apart from the abduction of girls to be sold as slaves in Darfur,” said Dr. Faiz Jamie, a Professor of Political Science at the University of Bahri-Sudan.

“The aim behind atrocities against the villagers is so that they can loot comfortably,” argues Jaime.

The conflict between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) began on April 15, 2023, after a breakdown in the transition to civilian rule, following the overthrow of long-time President Omar al-Bashir.

“RSF is now in control of the Darfur region. But the region is the most devastated as far as civilians are concerned. Genocidal activities were identified against the Masalit ethnic group, where people were buried alive, as documented by videos uploaded by the very perpetrators (the RSF),” said Jaime.

He said civilians are bearing the brunt of the conflict because the rationale behind the war is to drive them out of the cities and villages into settler-like camps.

For the last two years, the conflict has mainly been in the capital, Khartoum. But more recently, the fighters have spread to other towns and regions.

Attacks on civilians have been reported in ZamZam camp, Abu Shouk camp, Al Fasher, and North Darfur.

On April 25, the UN Human Rights Office said that it had listed at least 481 civilians killed in North Darfur since April 10 and that “the actual number is likely much higher.”

In the statement, UN rights chief Volker Turk said, “The suffering of the Sudanese people is hard to imagine, harder to comprehend, and simply impossible to accept.”

“Deliberately taking the life of a civilian or anyone not or no longer directly participating in hostilities is a war crime.”

The RSF is accused of deliberate assaults on medical facilities and the killing of nine Sudanese aid workers from Relief International.

Sudan INGO Forum, a coordination and representation body, added, “What is happening in ZamZam, Abu Shouk camp, and Al Fasher is not just a tragedy—it is an atrocity. Civilians are being starved, slaughtered, and prevented from fleeing. Aid workers and local volunteer responders are being hunted (down).”

Over 13 million had been internally displaced as of April 2025, and 3.3 million had fled to neighboring countries, namely Chad, South Sudan, and Ethiopia.

Displacement from Sudan’s conflict has left well over 13 million people displaced. Credit: UNHCR/Reason Moses Runyanga

“Ending the suffering of the suffering Sudanese civilians requires regional and international pressure on the United Arab Emirates to stop arming and funding the RSF,” suggests Jamie.

Alon Ben-Meir, a retired professor of international relations, said both sides are entrenched, with external backers.

“The United Arab Emirates (UAE) backs the RSF, while Egypt supports the SAF, which prolongs the conflict. These divisions led to the failure of the peace talks in Jeddah in late 2023 because of mutual distrust and competing regional interests,” he observed in an article titled A Nation Bleeds While The World Watches: The Tragedy In Sudan Must End.

Alex De Waal, Executive Director of the World Peace Foundation and Research Professor, Tufts University, has studied the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region for close to 40 years. He said what is being witnessed in that region is a catastrophe on an even greater scale than earlier conflicts.

“All famines are man-made and, in general language, deliberate. Political decisions have triggered every famine. We have had deliberate starvation or reckless indifference to human life. That is what is happening in Darfur,” said De Waal.

According to De Waal, the conflict in Sudan is the biggest by magnitude and the war in the Horn of Africa threatens what he describes as a mass mortality event in more than a generation.

“We have never before had a situation in which all the countries of this region are in the same kind of crisis at the same time,” he said

“In the past, if we had a humanitarian emergency in South Sudan, people would move from there to Northern Sudan; if we had a crisis in Darfur, they could move to Chad or Khartoum; and in the 1984 famine in Ethiopia, many people from Tigray moved to Khartoum as refugees. Those things are not possible when the whole region is in crisis,” he added.

He suggested that immediate response needs to be informed by an effort to address the political and economic causes of the conflicts in the Horn of Africa.

“It didn’t happen overnight. We need to call out the men. I repeat, men made these famines. And we need to look out for the economic breakdown preceding this.  Sudan, for instance, will need an enormous bailout. Ethiopia is going to need some fundamental economic restructuring.”

The Horn of Africa faces a humanitarian crisis as some 90 million people are in danger of famine. War continues to rage in South Sudan and Sudan, while a fragile peace has taken hold in Ethiopia after the Tigray War of 2020-2022.

Observers have noted that the region’s borders, unlike those in the rest of Africa, are in flux, as secessionist movements have successfully given birth to new states in South Sudan and Eritrea and a de facto state in Somaliland.

Jean-Marie Guéhenno, Director of Columbia SIPA’s Kent Global Leadership Program on Conflict Resolution, said the Horn of Africa is a victim of geopolitics at the moment.

“Where every country is looked at through the prism of geopolitical competition. Ethiopia has connections with the west, it also has strong connections with China. And every country is looking at how it is going to position itself,” observes Guéhenno, a former UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping.

He has noted that the divisions among the five permanent members of the UN Security Council—China, France, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America—in a way empower regional actors who may not necessarily want to support a peace process.

“So the division in the security council turns into the divisions in the regional divisions. And we see it certainly in the Horn, where you have different perspectives from different African countries, and you also have countries from the Gulf, which all have different interests. And so the situation is incredibly more complicated and, I would say, more fragmented,” notes Guéhenno.

The Gulf States stand accused of indulging in destabilizing political patronage of African actors, creating perverse incentives that undermine the foundations of peace.

The burden of the conflicts in the Horn of Africa and the Great Lakes region countries like DRC, among others, is disproportionately borne by women and children.

In the East of the mineral-rich DRC, in North Kivu and South Kivu, fighting between Congolese security forces and militant groups led by M23 escalated, culminating in M23’s capture of Goma. The fight has forced thousands of people to flee, sometimes multiple times.

“They are living in difficult conditions, often in extreme vulnerability. The multiple frontlines and the use of heavy artillery have led to many casualties, including an increasing number of civilians,” said Francine Kongolo, the spokesperson of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

ICRC said from the beginning of February 2025, more than 1400 weapon-wounded civilians had been treated at its surgical projects in the North and South Kivu provinces.

The United Nations Human Rights Office has documented more than 200 cases of rape and sexual violence in Eastern DRC since the start of the violence, some of which allegedly were perpetrated by M23.

“Reports from health facilities indicate a rise in rape cases, with children accounting for 30 percent of those treated,” the office said in a statement.

“As offensives intensify, more than 700,000 people, 41 percent of whom are school-aged children, have been displaced, and the number of casualties, including among children, is mounting at an alarming rate. A majority of cases remain unreported, and this may only be the tip of the iceberg.”

Meskerem Geset Techane, a human rights lawyer based in Ethiopia, has observed that the crisis in the Horn of Africa is a human rights crisis itself.

“Be it the food crisis or a peace crisis, it has taken a heavy toll on the protection of human rights across the region. We have seen the peace crisis in Ethiopia, Sudan, and South Sudan. It has not only violated the right to peace itself but also a range of fundamental human rights,” said Techane.

Jackline Nasiwa, Executive Director of the Center for Inclusive Governance, Peace, and Justice, said people of South Sudan are tired and traumatized.

Assefaw Bariagaber, a professor of diplomacy and international the readiness of these countries to amass such weapons without punishment from the international system is worrying.

“The availability of not only large amounts of armaments but also much more modern armaments, devastating armaments, needs to be checked; that is what has increased violence and civilian suffering. More than 150,000 people have lost their lives, and over 25 million have been displaced, including me,” he said.

There is a feeling that the institutions under the African Union and the leaders have not done what they should to protect the civilians from the disturbing increase in violence by the armed combatants.

Dr. Sabastiano Rwengabo, a Ugandan Political Scientist suggested the need to pressure states to strengthen institutions so they can  “bite,” including, where necessary, against states.

“It is because of some of these dishonesties and vested interests that member states don’t allow regional or continental bodies to act in a way that would prevent or reverse civilian victimization in armed conflicts,” Rwengabo told IPS.

Last month the DRC and Rwanda-backed M23 in April agreed to pause fighting as they work towards a broader peace deal.

Critics of the African Union processes said the truce wouldn’t have been possible if Qatar had not arranged a meeting between Presidents Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Felix Tshisekdi of the DRC.

In a diplomatic tone, Kagame did not attribute the truce to the Qatar meeting but to what he described as several efforts at the same time.

“You look at the whole continent, and you find many trouble spots in different areas in different areas. There are all kinds of efforts going on back and forth. Succeeding in some places and not succeeding in others. These are some of the problems of the past and how we have handled our affairs,” said Kagame while addressing the Africa CEO Forum 2025 in Abidjan.

Part of the African-led efforts in resolving the conflict in DRC involved the deployment of South African troops participating in the Southern African Development Community (SADC). The South African troops were withdrawn as the M23 captured the conflict zone in Goma.

President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa explained that the processes under the Nairobi accord, the Luanda process and the African Union process have been essential in building a foundation of peace-making and also confidence-building.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By Peter Thomson
NICE, France, May 21 2025 – The United Nations Ocean Conference (UNOC) takes place every three years and in just a few weeks, the international community will gather in Nice, France, at a time when the International Science Council has called for the world to address the new reality of a disrupted Earth system.

Research has found that global human health is intrinsically linked to the health of the ocean, but consequences predicted by science are beginning to confront us, with the current global coral bleaching and mortality event being the most intense on record, sea surface temperatures continuing to skyrocket and microplastics found in 60 percent of fish, it is now impossible to ignore that climate change and associated environmental stressors are impacting the ocean system and human wellbeing.

Credit: Pexels – Pixabay

Despite this linkage, UN Sustainable Development Goal 14 (SDG 14), which is meant to support the conservation and sustainable use of ocean resources, remains the least funded of any SDG—receiving just 0.01 percent of all development funding.

UNOC is therefore a crucial moment for the world to come together and take bold action in support of sustainable ocean economies.

Three special events will be held in the days before the conference: the One Ocean Science Congress which will gather the world’s leading ocean scientists to deliberate on the science we need for the ocean we want; the Blue Economy and Finance Forum, which will focus on transformative financing for ocean action; and the third will launch a coalition of cities and coastal communities to advance global and local response to sea level rise.

Climate change has already led to a four-inch rise in sea level since satellite measurement began in 1993 and the UN has calculated that 900 million people living in low-lying coastal areas are going to be placed in acute danger.

All three special event subjects demand concerted international attention in these challenging times.

Thankfully, important work has already begun. In 2022, the world agreed that in order to prevent a massive loss of biodiversity on this planet, we must set about protecting 30% of the planet by 2030 through the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF).

In pursuance of that goal, a 30×30 Ocean Action Plan will be presented at UNOC to give attention to new funding models for Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), and with the opportunity to ratify the High Seas Treaty enabling of protected areas in the High Seas.

It is hoped that by the time the Nice conference is underway that the required number of national ratifications of the High Seas Treaty will have been received, thus allowing the treaty to come into force this year.

However, our management of the ocean must be as interconnected as the ocean itself—the 100% Alliance, is a crucial opportunity where countries commit to sustainably manage 100% of their national waters through evidence-based Sustainable Ocean Plans. By joining this initiative, countries can show their ambition and commitment to a more sustainably productive and prosperous ocean economy that benefits both people and nature.

The Alliance’s comprehensive management approach, coupled with the 30×30 goal, will ensure that new MPAs are not only established, but are effectively managed and financed as part of an integrated ocean stewardship agenda.

Meanwhile, a commitment to science-based sustainable management of fish-stocks must extend to the cessation of harmful fisheries subsidies. The latter are largely enjoyed by industrial fishing fleets, busy depleting the ocean of its declining resources.

At the WTO in Geneva the necessary agreement to end harmful subsidies is very close to reality, with the salutary effect of the UN Ocean Conference likely to facilitate the desired WTO consensus.

The conference will work towards the curtailment of marine pollution and will in tandem be urging the attainment this year of a robust, internationally-binding plastics treaty. In this task we must not stumble, for agreement on the proposed treaty is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to control plastic production and pollution.

There is no doubt that control is required, for it is estimated that somewhere between one and three million tonnes of microplastics enter the ocean in a year.

Scientific evidence is clear that these particles can absorb and accumulate toxic pollutants, and that they can cross biological barriers, posing risks to the health of oceanic food webs. I emphasise the word health, for emerging evidence of the harm being done to humans by the unregulated chemicals present in many plastics, is of growing concern to us all.

At the conclusion of the 10th Our Ocean Conference (OOC) in Busan, Korea, at the end of April, it was announced that the annual meetings have generated $160 billion over the past decade in voluntary commitments to improve the ocean. An important achievement in mobilizing the necessary finance, but a much greater global ambition is required to address the urgent challenges.

As we prepare for the 3rd UN Ocean Conference may we all dedicate ourselves to the true course set by multilateralism and the observance of international law. Without further delay, may we commit ourselves to a just transition to net zero, to an equitably electrified world powered by renewable energy.

Let us find hope in progress and allow reason and innovation to overcome the mounting challenges ahead. Let us take the tide while it serves, and through faithful implementation of SDG14, may we bequeath a healthy ocean to our children and grandchildren.

IPS UN Bureau

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Excerpt:

Ambassador Peter Thomson is UN Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for the Ocean