Fighting driving Sudan to collapse

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 10 (AP): Nearly four months of brutal fighting is driving Sudan to collapse with millions of people trapped in a "humanitarian calamity" and the possibility of a new ethnic conflict spilling into the region, U.N. officials said Wednesday.

The dire briefings to the U.N. Security Council by Assistant Secretary-General Martha Pobee and the U.N. humanitarian agency's operations director, Edem Wosornu, painted a grim picture of escalating clashes and no sign of an end to the conflict, which the government said in June had killed more than 3,000 people. No figures have been released since then.

Wosornu said the country's descent into "a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe" has only deepened with more than 4 million people fleeing their homes and over 20 million - more than half the population - facing "high levels of food insecurity," or serious hunger.

The fighting pits forces loyal to top army Gen. Abdel-Fattah Burhan against the paramilitary forces commanded by his rival, Gen. Mohammed Hamdan Dagalo, and clashes have continued especially in the capital, Khartoum, and nearby cities and the vast western Darfur region, which became synonymous with war crimes and genocide two decades ago.

Pobee told the council that neither side is "achieving victory nor making any significant gains," and the Sudanese people are facing "unimaginable suffering."

She pointed to indiscriminate and sometimes targeted attacks on civilians and civilian infrastructure, large-scale sexual violence and children being killed, victimized or at risk of being recruited to fight. The abduction and killing of human rights defenders in Khartoum and Darfur are also on the rise, she said.

Pobee, who is in charge of Africa in the U.N. political affairs department, called for a negotiated solution to end the war as soon as possible.

"The longer this war continues, the greater the risk of fragmentation and foreign interference and erosion of sovereignty and the loss of Sudan's future, particularly its youth," she said.

U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield, who chaired the meeting, said the United States was "appalled" that the U.N. special envoy for Sudan, Volker Perthes, was replaced by Pobee as the U.N. briefer after the Sudanese government threatened to end the U.N. political mission in Sudan.