Digital press briefing with the U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan, Tom Perriello . Special Envoy Perriello gave a readout of the Aligned for Advancing Lifesaving and Peace in Sudan (ALPS) Group talks. He reviewed progress the United States and its international partners made on humanitarian priorities, including the expansion of access routes, and underscored the continuing need to expand humanitarian assistance to other areas to help the Sudanese people.
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MODERATOR: Good afternoon to everyone from the U.S. Department of State’s Africa Regional Media Hub. I welcome our participants logging in from across the world and thank all of you for joining us today. We are very pleased to be joined by the U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan, Tom Perriello.
Special Envoy Perriello will give a readout of the ALPS Group talks, and that is Aligned for Advancing Lifesaving and Peace in Sudan. He will review progress the United States and its international partners have made on humanitarian priorities, including the expansion of access routes, and underscore the continuing need to expand humanitarian assistance to other areas to help the Sudanese people.
We will begin today’s briefing with opening remarks from Special Envoy Perriello, then we will turn to your questions. We will try to get to as many of them as we can during the briefing.
So with that, I’d like to turn it over to Special Envoy Perriello for his opening remarks.
MR PERRIELLO: Thank you so much, Johann, and thank you to all of you for tuning in today. The scale of suffering in Sudan truly shocks the conscience, and it so rarely gets the coverage that it needs, whether that’s in the Western media, African, or Gulf media. So we appreciate those who continue to follow this horrific level of suffering. We do have some rare good news in terms of developments out of our recent initiatives, but the overall story continues to be one of over 25 million people facing forms of acute hunger, a million at levels of starvation, 10 million being able to – being forced to flee from their homes. The people of Sudan have suffered for far too long, with the 16 months of war and the daily horrors of shelling from the RSF, aerial bombing from the SAF, and the kinds of atrocities particularly against women and children, who have borne the brunt of this.
Given the scale of the suffering and the paralysis diplomatically, President Biden and Secretary Blinken asked me to lead an initiative of diplomatic partners, including key countries in the region and multilateral organizations, to meet in Switzerland to see whether we could produce some breakthroughs on key elements across three areas: humanitarian access, protection to civilians, and cessation to hostilities. We were able over a couple of weeks working intensively around the clock and with other partners back in our capitals and around the world for this ALPS Group to be able to produce some very significant breakthroughs.
Our first priority was to look at three access routes into the areas of famine and acute hunger. We were able to get agreement on the opening of the Adré border, to get agreements from the RSF and SAF to guarantee access along those routes; similarly, to get pledges of guarantees of access across the Dabbah Road coming east from Port Sudan. Both of those remain active and open, now with dozens of trucks crossing and nearly 6 million pounds of food and emergency relief reaching areas in need. We need that to continue and to accelerate, and we are actively negotiating on a daily basis for additional expansions, including access through Sennar State into the heartland of Sudan, and we are continuing to push the parties and get closer to an option that would expand access there.
It was the goals of President Biden and Secretary Blinken that we would be able to focus on concrete results that made a difference in the lives of the Sudanese people. Success was not going to be measured in words on a piece of paper, but on food and medicine reaching those who have been facing starvation for months, and we believe that we have begun to get – to move forward with that success, but we have much more to do along with our partners in the ALPS Group and more.
On the issue of civilian protection, we were able to get a commitment to a code of conduct by the Rapid Support Forces with a deadline by the end of the month of being able to put that out publicly to all those fighting under their auspices. We also worked with a group of Sudanese women on a number of aspects related to the atrocities inside of Sudan, and that included efforts to ensure that the code of conduct reflected the lived realities and horrors of those on the ground. We will continue. We’ve made that same request of the army. We will continue to look at additional steps that can be taken by the parties, even if the war continues, to make sure that the basic commitments that they both made under the Jeddah Declaration as well as under international humanitarian law are met.
On the third area of priority of cessation of hostilities, we unfortunately see a lack of political will at the time for the parties to stop fighting, and in fact are accelerating, and on that we have two responses. First is the importance of understanding even in times of war that international humanitarian law and protection of civilians must be respected; and second, we have to find a way to get the parties together to find an end to this war that is leading to the suffering of millions inside Sudan as well as spilling over increasingly into the neighboring countries. The United States is the largest humanitarian donor by far, contributing over a billion dollars since the beginning of the war to support humanitarian emergency needs inside Sudan as well as support to neighboring countries who’ve opened their homes and borders to the Sudanese, and we will continue to work with many allies around the world on increasing that support.
Finally, we believe that the end of this war is essential and that that must protect a unified and sovereign Sudan, and that all of those who are pushing for alternative approaches, whether partition or otherwise, should not have a future in the discussion here of what happens in Sudan. The people have been very clear and unified in wanting a cessation of hostilities, wanting to make sure there’s access to all 18 states for food and medicine, and wanting to return to the values and the aspirations of the revolution back in 2019 of an inclusive, democratic Sudan in which the people are able to define their own future.
This was an unusual and I would say innovative approach to negotiations given the fact that there had been resistance to participation from some of the key actors, and what we were able to do with the leadership of Secretary Blinken was a combination of in-person negotiations of technical experts, multilateral institutions, and key country partners – proximity talks, essentially – with the Rapid Support Forces that did send a delegation and virtual but daily communication with the army on the key breakthroughs we were able to deliver. Again, we believe that this must just be a start, but it does hopefully show to the people of Sudan that their demand of the international community and the United States to do more and to understand the urgency of their plight has been heard, and we hope in the coming weeks that we can continue to build on those successes, and including the issues of addressing famine but also expanding the protection for civilians and hopefully building common ground for a cessation of hostilities.
We continue to meet on a daily basis – or work on a daily basis, and we will have our first virtual head-of-delegation follow-up meeting of the ALPS Group later today, and we will continue to work with a broad set of partners and friends of Sudan on the kind of concrete results that hopefully can be felt on the ground. And it’s been clear in my system, certainly, that this is a priority, has been for some time. We’d actually hoped to get these talks launched in April, and then in May, and then in June, and felt like we needed to go forward with this approach, and I think the results hopefully are those that can give people a sense of hope. But that must be something that’s just the beginning and not the end of progress from this initiative.
Thank you so much for that, and with that, I will hand back to you for questions.
MODERATOR: Thank you, Special Envoy Perriello. We will now begin the question-and-answer portion of today’s briefing. So we ask that folks limit yourself to one question only and that it be related to the topic of today’s briefing, which is the ALPS Group talks on Sudan in Switzerland.
So for our very first question I’d like to go to Suzy Elgeneidy of Alahram newspaper in Egypt, and the question is this: “How can the U.S. cooperate with Sudan’s neighboring countries to try to prevent the hunger and people suffering in Sudan?”
MR PERRIELLO: Well, first of all, let me just say how thankful we are to the Egyptian Government for now housing over a million Sudanese refugees and being incredibly active partners in the mediation and efforts to get this going. The country of Egypt, of course, understands more than just about any how serious the crisis is in Sudan and their commitment to trying to find a path to peace and to help with some of these key breakthroughs on humanitarian access was essential.
As noted before, the United States has given over $1 billion since the start of the war to support refugee efforts by the neighboring countries as well as emergency support inside. We are continuing to expand that support. We also are working with Sudanese refugees on various challenges they face having been displaced from homes – in some cases, due to telecom blackouts and other things, not even knowing if family members are alive or dead. So we will continue to work with the neighboring countries, and of course the single most important thing we could do is to end the war itself. Most – the vast majority of Sudanese want to return home but can only do so when they feel that it is not a life-threatening activity.
So we will work both with the immediate refugee support, emergency support efforts, but also the underlying cause here, which is to get to a cessation of hostilities and the ability of people to return.
MODERATOR: Thank you very much. So for the second question I’d like to go to Asharq News in United Arab Emirates, Mr. Sideek Al Sammarraie. So the question is this: “The head of the participating army delegation said that what happened in Geneva was not negotiations in the agreed-upon sense, and that it was a coordinated escape from the obligations of the Jeddah Forum. How do you see that, Special Envoy Perriello?”
MR PERRIELLO: Well, I think that excuse was proven clearly false by the work we did in Switzerland, which was absolutely based on implementing – pushing for implementation of the Jeddah Declaration and existing commitments under international humanitarian law. And I think that’s why we were able to get progress with both the RSF and the army, with whom we were engaging on a regular basis. So I think there were a lot of political excuses given for not participating, but the truth was we ended up being able to engage with a large number of people, including those inside the army, and make clear that we absolutely are building on the Jeddah Declaration, and these are commitments already made by both the RSF and the army.
And I think one of the main things we heard, not just from the SAF but from the Sudanese people, was a desire to see enforcement of existing Jeddah declarations. That’s exactly what we put people together to do. And I think that shows that there are no excuses going forward for trying to avoid those obligations both parties have made, and that’s why we’re continuing, on a daily and weekly basis, to try to move forward with getting both parties to live up to the agreements they’ve made at Jeddah and beyond.
MODERATOR: All right, thank you very much. So next question I’d like to go to our Washington Post reporter Brian Rohan, located in the United Arab Emirates. So the question is this: “Are any countries being urged to halt weapons shipments to factions in Sudan? Specifically, how is the UAE being addressed following ‘credible’ – in quotes – ‘credible’ evidence presented by UN experts of UAE shipments to the RSF? Is a blanket appeal to all actors to cease fueling and prolonging this conflict enough?”
MR PERRIELLO: We’ve been calling on all external actors to stop fueling this war, stop arming the participants, and begin being partners in the peace effort. We are seeing an increasing number of external actors, both countries and negative forces, pouring fuel on the fire of Sudan, and the people of Sudan are certainly upset about it and want to see that stop. In the immediate, we’ve been working both to enforce and to extend the arms embargo for Darfur at the United Nations, and our sanctions on some of the RSF actors and entities supporting them, I think, has been essential in trying to give more robust enforcement to that effort.
But we will also look more generally at efforts that we can stop that flow, particularly from those countries and entities that would support the dissolution of Sudan or the state. So yes, we will continue to look at efforts to discourage the flow of arms into the country, and more importantly, to get countries to be partners in trying to end the war and help the Sudanese people rebuild the country.
MODERATOR: All right, thank you for that question. We have a question which was submitted by Kamal Tabikha of The National news in Nairobi. Of course, as a neighboring country, always interesting to get a perspective. So the question is: “Some have questioned whether the international community, including the United States, has devoted adequate high-level attention and resources to resolving the Sudan crisis, given the pressing global challenges. How do you view the priority placed on Sudan by the U.S. Government, and are there plans to intensify diplomatic efforts?”
MR PERRIELLO: I think you have absolutely been seeing the United States elevate its engagement to the highest levels. Not only did President Biden and Secretary Blinken ask us to put this initiative together and, quite frankly, take some diplomatic risk in doing so with some of the parties signaling that they were not going to participate, at least in the traditional sense, but you saw Secretary Blinken visiting Cairo or Alamein right in the middle of the talks, meeting with President Sisi and Egyptian leadership. And I think that’s what you’re seeing from the United States, is that at the highest levels of our government we’ve been engaged in diplomatic efforts to end this war and also to address the horrific issues of atrocities, ethic cleansing, rape and abuse of women.
We do believe the international community has failed to meet the level of urgency for the crisis of Sudan. We really are appreciative of the partners that were part of the ALPS initiative as well as other key partners in the region, like IGAD and Arab League, and the EU and others. So I think we have seen, since the beginning of this year, increased attention on the crisis, but we still believe it doesn’t get anything like the attention it needs and deserves, given the scale of suffering.
I do think in addition to the stark scale of humanitarian suffering, you also now have a crisis that represents a real regional threat to instability. And I think that has also increased the attention from a number of key actors, who I think collectively can help us to find a path to peace and a return to the civilian transition inside Sudan. But much more needs to be done, and we believe this recent initiative led by the United States was a significant statement about the fact that we can accept – no longer accept any excuses for inaction, and we want to move forward and produce the results we can, but we have a long go to do right by the people of Sudan.
MODERATOR: All right. Thank you very much. So we received a question from Bloomberg in Sudan, Mr. Mohammed Alamin. And Mohammed asks: “Why is the international community keen to open corridors inside Sudan while it doesn’t work to deliver the assistance to millions of Sudanese refugees outside Sudan who are also suffering?”
MR PERRIELLO: Well, it’s an important question. We are doing that. We’ve actually been very active – both the United States, our partners with OCHA and WFP and others, and of course working with the neighboring countries – to be able to get assistance to key areas. And we’ve certainly seen major refugee populations both in camps and urban refugees in Ethiopia, in Egypt, obviously in Chad, Uganda, Kenya, so many other countries. So we’ve been supporting that financially. We’ve been working as logistical partners as well.
But it is true that the hardest populations to reach have been many of those in Darfur and other parts of Sudan that have been cut off, particularly during the rainy season. So while we continue to support those refugee efforts outside the country, there was a particular urgency on getting a breakthrough. And again, when we convened in August, none of the three major arteries were open into key parts of not just the west but the north and the south in Sudan. So being able to negotiate the opening of the Adré crossing and all of the corollary elements of that, the Dabbah Road access from the east, needing a little redundancy in there because on any given day there are both human and natural disasters that come across that prevent that, and again, continuing to work on an access route through Sennar into the heartland of Sudan that I think we will hopefully be able to reach in the coming days.
So this is an ongoing effort. It is focused both on these acute needs of those who have been stranded, in some cases, for many months from emergency aid access, in addition to wanting to look at these things that continue to exacerbate the suffering, like the shelling from the RSF that’s been documented, again, systematically just over the last couple of weeks. And we continue to see the need for things like the dam breaking – that while the flooding was from natural causes per se, it’s also true that we have conditions that make it difficult for the kind of engineers and technical experts to be on the ground protecting the civilian infrastructure that will have ramifications for a generation to come. And we need this generation of the diplomatic community to step up so that we don’t lose an entire generation inside Sudan.
MODERATOR: All right. Thank you for that. We have a question which was just submitted by Nafisa Eltahir from Reuters, and the question is: “Could we see another round of talks before the end of the rainy season, when fighting is expected to pick up again? Will future rounds of talks necessarily include the ALPS Group or could we see a return to the Jeddah format in terms of participation and location?”
MR PERRIELLO: Thanks, Nafisa. So first of all, I think what we are doing is continuing the negotiations as we speak. As I said, the first meeting of the heads of delegation since Switzerland will happen in about an hour, later today, virtually. I think one of the things that we really turned a corner on was this idea that it’s 2024 and we don’t have to be constrained by some of the things that have slowed down diplomacy in the past, the formalities of convenings and invitations and all of the things that get us stuck on excuses not to produce results. What was so magical in Switzerland was this idea that every morning we could be meeting with the frontline technical experts, both that were in the room and that were in Sudan, saying exactly where the chokepoints were preventing people from getting food and medicine; where the worst acts were in terms of atrocities against civilians. We could then reach agreement as a united front on the asks back to the RSF and the SAF. In some cases, that also required reaching out to the Chadian Government, or to lawyers inside the UN system, or to donor countries, and working the problem. As we kept saying all week, our methodology was results, and that’s going to continue to be our methodology, is results.
So we have been working in the days since then. We will be meeting again today. And we had proposed an in-person, and basically people said, hey, look, the system – we believe what you’ve been throwing down here, which is that the system is working. And so we can meet much more regularly instead of the kind of work that might make that another three or four weeks before we meet. Obviously, we signal and other things where we can check in on an hourly basis. So as humanitarians can tell us when the trucks are moving, where the trucks are getting stopped, what is the issue that’s preventing food and medicine from getting into mouths. Because again, the methodology of results means that we’re not looking for an agreement on a piece of paper; we’re looking for food and medicine in the mouths of those who need it, we’re looking at fewer atrocities and less fear for civilians in areas that are being bombed.
We do hope to continue to build to in-person rounds; that’s still useful at points. But I think the most important thing is that this is an active effort.
On the question of who the expanded group, we – again, I think part of what we’ve done is to kind of break down the walls of the room where it happens and be able to say at any given moment we can pick up the phone and call a country or an organization that has a particularly good relationship or knowledge on an issue, so we were able to draw from Arab League, IGAD, and EU partners, from many subject matter experts, and others. So I think our effort here as much as possible is to focus on what gets the results we need. And again, I think on that we’ve got the humanitarian access foundation, we’ve got the civilian protection efforts that need to expand out, and then ultimately want to be able to look at cessations of hostilities. And we will work with anyone who is interested in trying to help the people of Sudan.
MODERATOR: All right, thank you. For our next question, we’ll go to Samia Ibraheem of Sky News Arabic channel in Egypt. And Samia asks: “Are U.S. efforts to achieve peace in Sudan continuing effectively without the participation of the other party?” And in parentheses: “(This is about the talks in Switzerland and the absence of the SAF.)”
MR PERRIELLO: Well, first of all, as I said, the efforts are continuing and the engagement with both the RSF and the army is a daily engagement. And I think this, again, goes to trying to move away from 20th century or even 19th century versions of diplomacy into what we can do with modern technology, and why we built the team of the ALPS – because we have many countries and multilats in that who also, like the United States, are in regular contact with the army, as well as with the RSF. And this is a coalition that is meant to be able to move forward in a very action-oriented way with the parties to try to expand the results on humanitarian access, civilian protection, and cessation of hostilities.
Certainly the Egyptians have played an outsized role throughout preparing for the talks there. In fact, that Secretary Blinken was visiting President Sisi and other government leaders in the middle of the talks; it certainly wasn’t lost on people that Director Kamal was visiting Port Sudan at key moments, and this was really a team effort. So I think we really appreciate the leadership of Egypt and others in the ALPS Group on being able to figure out a way to get to the results the Sudanese people want.
We’re going to continue, as we said, to work this on a daily basis. We are pleased to see that not only were we able to see some progress, including key things like the announcement from the Sovereign Council about Adré, but when there were more negative forces trying to undermine those efforts and prevent that progress, I think there were concerted efforts by the Sovereign Council and others to prioritize getting food and medicine to the people. And we want to try to continue to build on those positive results.
MODERATOR: All right. So the time is growing short. I think we have time maybe for one more question. So I’d like to go Kemi Osukoya of Africa Bazaar . Kemi’s question: “You mentioned that the international community has been slow to respond to the situation in Sudan. Could you elaborate and provide context on why addressing this issue in Sudan is critical beyond the humanitarian issues we see?”
MR PERRIELLO: Well, certainly first and foremost, we see this is a human crisis that has 20 million people – over 20 million people facing acute hunger, having 11 million displaced from their homes. But we also know that this is a country that is very – is central to the regional economy and to regional stability. One of its strengths is its diversity, but also many of those ethnic populations have overlapping populations in neighboring countries. And if this war becomes more factionalized and more ethnicized, it’s more likely to bring in some of the regional neighbors. It certainly has a key presence on the Red Sea port, and we see it as having, again, a key agricultural impact in the region.
So what we know right now is that while nobody can win this war militarily, everybody in the region loses by this war continuing and continuing to escalate. And I think we’re seeing a larger number of actors in the region who may have leaned to one side or the other of the conflict earlier actually being united now on the most important thing being that we need to end this war and get back to the transition that the Sudanese people have wanted that brings us back to a more stable place.
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We also know that there are negative actors internally that need this war to continue, and I think these are efforts – particularly, we’ve seen some of the political forces, like the former regime officials from the NCP, who know they don’t have support from the people, so they need the war to continue to try to lock in governmental or political power, and I think they’ve probably been doing a lot of negative work to undermine Burhan and the Sovereign Council. We have those now who are war profiteers who need the war to continue in order to continue to make money off of it. And we see more foreign fighters coming in on the RSF side who do not have any interest in the stability or well-being of the Sudanese people.
And so, again, we see negative forces that make it more likely that this will become a source of regional instability, and certainly some of the negative external actors would represent an even longer term threat to stability in the region. The good news is the Sudanese people, again, are united in wanting this war to end. They want to see a sovereign Sudan, and they want to see a united professional military under a democratic civilian government. And right now we’re going to continue to stand with the people to move in that direction. But the crisis is absolutely the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, but it is also a very serious threat to regional stability.
MODERATOR: All right. Thank you for that. So that brings us to the end of the question-and-answer portion. We definitely covered a lot of ground today, Special Envoy Perriello, but I just wanted to give you a chance, if there’s anything we didn’t get to, for any last words you might have to share with us.
MR PERRIELLO: Well, thank you. I think that the first test of whether this initiative launched by Biden, Blinken, and others was successful, which is did it produce results for people – we’re seeing that, and the millions of pounds of food that’s now crossing areas that previously were cut off from humanitarian aid. But the next test is whether we build on that progress. And I think we certainly hear from the Sudanese people that they want to see more results from the international community.
We will continue to work with all sides internally to try to produce those results. We do believe ultimately there is no military solution to this conflict, and a mediated solution is the quickest way to ensure a stable and sovereign Sudan and the long-term strength of a professional SAF, and we want to support all of those efforts. In the immediate term, we are very focused on making sure food and medicine gets to those who are facing famine. We need to see an end to the indiscriminate shelling, particularly by the RSF. We hope the code of conduct reached in the ALPS will take effect very soon and help to reduce or eliminate the kind of abuses and atrocities that we’ve seen. We will continue to push for those efforts together.
And I think also, hopefully, this removed a lot of the mysteries that – and false claims that were made about this process. I think we showed that this was very much focused on implementing the Jeddah Declaration commitments. It was very focused on delivering the results for the Sudanese people. It was certainly very focused on the idea of protecting a sovereign and stable and unified Sudan. And I think that, as we said, the methodology was results that can – that’s going to continue to be the methodology, that we focus on those results. And I think what we were able to do was show that some of the excuses for not participating not only faded away, but in fact people were participating on an almost hourly basis, and that if we focused a little less on some of the formalities of diplomatic convenings and instead focus on producing results for the Sudanese people, then we can continue to build on that progress in the weeks ahead.
I certainly appreciate that President Biden and Secretary Blinken have been so personally engaged with the crisis in Sudan and I think are encouraging others across the region, across the world to do so. The partners that we had in the ALPS Group were certainly that along with many other partners, and most of all, I think, just continuing to see the courage of the Sudanese people, including our direct engagement through the talks both virtually with people inside Sudan and outside of Sudan in the build-up to the talks and some of the Sudanese women experts who helped inform how we can make sure that the results we’re pushing are prioritizing the same – the lived realities of people on the ground.
So we will continue to build on that with the ALPS Group starting later today with the follow-up meeting, but again, this is a 24/7 operation. And last of all, I just want to thank the humanitarian workers on the ground, particularly the Sudanese workers both in formal humanitarian groups and also in more traditional and indigenous mutual aid efforts – many of whom have given their lives to protect their neighbors, to try to feed their neighbors. There are true heroes in this story, and they’re in this war, who continue to risk their lives every day to try to feed and protect neighbors who are facing horrific crisis. And we hope those stories continue to be told. But the best way we can honor their courage and sacrifice is through our actions, and that’s what we’re trying to do with the ALPS initiative and beyond. Thank you.
MODERATOR: All right. Well, that concludes today’s briefing. I want to thank the U.S. Special Envoy for Sudan, Tom Perriello, for joining us today, and thanks also to all the journalists who participated. A recording and transcript of today’s briefing will be distributed to participating journalists as soon as we can produce them here at the hub. If you have any questions about today’s briefing, you may contact the Africa Regional Media Hub at AFMediaHub@state.gov. I would also like to invite everyone to follow us on Twitter at our handle @AfricaMediaHub. Thank you very much.
