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Sudan’s military launched a disarmament campaign Tuesday to confiscate all illegal weapons in a country awash in weapons after decades of civil war, blowing up 300,000 guns.
“Our country has suffered enough,” Lieutenant General Ibrahim Jaber Ibrahim, a member of the sovereign council, the country’s highest body, said at a ceremony in the desert.
“We are going to take very strict measures to prevent the possession of weapons,” Ibrahim said, speaking at the Hager al Assal base, about 200 kilometers (125 miles) north of the capital Khartoum.
“They must remain exclusively in the hands of regular forces.”
Several civil wars have raged in Sudan on and off since independence in 1956, including the 1983-2005 war that led to the secession of the south and the devastating conflict in western Darfur that began in 2003.
The Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research organization, estimates that in 2017 there were 2.76 million weapons in illegal possession in Sudan, or 6.6 weapons for every 100 people.
In addition to Darfur in the west, the Islamist regime of ousted President Omar al-Bashir fought rebel forces in the east and in the southern states of Blue Nile and South Kordofan.
The weapons destroyed Tuesday had been surrendered “voluntarily” for the past three years, the army said.
Thousands of firearms collected over the past three years in Sudan were destroyed in an explosion controlled by the army to launch the disarmament campaign. By ASHRAF SHAZLY (AFP) “Now he is no longer a volunteer,” said Abdel Hadi Abdallah, the general leading the disarmament campaign. “It is mandatory to deliver them.”
The disarmament campaign follows a ceasefire agreement last month between the government of Sudan, which came to power after Bashir’s expulsion in 2019, and rebel commanders from the Sudan Revolutionary Front (SRF) coalition.
The peace agreement aims to end nearly two decades of conflict that have killed hundreds of thousands of people, particularly in Darfur.
Rebel fighters will slowly merge into joint units with government security forces.
A Western diplomat warned Tuesday that “it was not safe for armed groups to allow themselves to be disarmed.”
The holdout rebels have also refused to participate in the deal.
One group, the Darfur-based Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) faction led by Abdelwahid Nour, launched an attack on Monday, the army said.
Another, the South Kordofan-based wing of the North Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM-N) led by Abdelaziz al-Hilu, has signed a separate ceasefire.
That agreement allows the rebels to keep their weapons to “protect themselves” until Sudan’s constitution is changed to separate religion and government.
