American-led talks to halt Sudan’s war, convened at an exclusive Swiss ski resort, ended after 10 days on Friday with agreements to deliver food and medicine to millions of starving Sudanese in the country’s most famine-stricken areas.
But the mediators failed to broker a cease-fire, or even to get both sides around the table, after Sudan’s military refused to show up. Frustrated American and Arab diplomats said the breakdown exposed the disarray and internal divisions in Sudan’s weakened military, which are a major obstacle to ending Africa’s biggest war.
The United States hoped the talks in Villars-sur-Ollon, a picturesque village 80 miles by road from Geneva, could break an eight-month diplomatic deadlock. The military and its foe, the Rapid Support Forces, or R.S.F., have not held direct talks since January. Since then, war has spread, bringing a widespread humanitarian crisis that this month led to a rare declaration of famine.
In a sealed-off area inside a hotel that was otherwise occupied by unsuspecting tourists, diplomats from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Switzerland attended the talks. So did representatives from the African Union and the United Nations.
The R.S.F. sent a delegation that the Swiss housed in lakeside town 25 miles away.
At one point this week, Tom Perriello, the United States envoy to Sudan, broke away from the talks and flew to Cairo to meet an official Sudanese delegation, hoping to coax its members to attend. But the Sudanese sent delegates who the Americans and Egyptians thought were not interested in peace. Egypt’s intelligence chief, Abbas Kamel, who had brokered the meeting, called it off at the last minute, according to two officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations.
Mr. Perriello said on X that the meeting was canceled because the Sudanese had “breached protocols.”
Every time Sudan’s military leader, Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, takes steps toward peace, “he faces immediate backlash from political forces in his coalition with nefarious reasons to extend this war,” Mr. Perriello said an interview on Friday. “They need this war, with all its unimaginable suffering, so that they can reclaim power that the Sudanese people would never give them voluntarily.”
The military did not immediately respond to questions about the negotiations. It previously said it would not attend if the United Arab Emirates, which backs the R.S.F., was there.
With cease-fire talks off the table, mediators pivoted to humanitarian issues. Although some are on opposite sides of the war — Egypt has traditionally backed Sudan’s army, while the Emiratis back the Rapid Support Forces — several diplomats said they put aside their political differences and worked together to negotiate concessions from both sides on humanitarian access.
“We need to get trucks in now. We need to get medical supplies in now,” Lana Nusseibeh, the United Arab Emirates’ ambassador to the United Nations, said. “It’s that urgency which is driving everyone’s presence here.”
The Emirati presence drew sharp criticism from Sudanese civil-society leaders who pointed to reports that the Emiratis had been arming the R.S.F. — a weapons pipeline that is still operating, several officials said.
Some accused Mr. Perriello of “whitewashing” the Emirati role by inviting them. But by Friday, he could point to some concrete achievements to save lives.
Mr. Perriello said the group had secured guarantees from both sides to allow unfettered humanitarian access to two key arteries: the main border crossing with Chad, which had been closed since February, and the main road to the Zamzam camp for displaced people, in the Darfur region. The global authority on hunger declared a famine in Zamzam on Aug. 1, the world’s first in four years.
Michel O. Lacharité of Doctors Without Borders, one of the few aid groups working in the Zamzam camp, welcomed the news, saying there was “no time to waste” in scaling up aid and “translating announcements into action on the ground.”
But even those gains have not been straightforward. By Thursday, 16 United Nations trucks had crossed the western border into Sudan from Chad, raising hopes that they might be the start of a flood of famine relief into Darfur. About 100 more trucks were waiting at the border.
But then the Sudanese government body that coordinates humanitarian aid ordered the trucks to stop moving, apparently countermanding an earlier order issued at the behest of the military.
Talks were underway on Friday to resolve the blockage. But officials said it appeared to be emblematic of wider divisions inside Sudan’s military government. Islamists loyal to the ousted president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was overthrown in 2019, have grown more powerful in the past nine months as Sudan’s military has suffered a succession of battlefield defeats.
That has in turn weakened the authority of the military ruler, General al-Burhan, who in a desperate search for weapons has turned to new sources, including Iran, the Houthis of Yemen and Russia, officials said.
The disarray in the army ranks offered an easy propaganda win for the Rapid Support Forces, whose delegation spent most of the past two weeks in the lakeside town of Vevey, where they met diplomats and made commitments to rein in fighters who have been accused of rape, massacres and ethnic cleansing.
The delegation included Algoney Hamdan, the 34-year-old brother of the R.S.F. leader, Lt. Gen. Mohamed Hamdan. In an interview, Algoney Hamdan claimed to be ready for talks. But he also accused the army of “playing games” and said its reluctance to talk about peace reflected its weak position on the ground.
“They once ruled Sudan,” he said. “They had their chance. And now they are finished.”
During the talks, a steady drumbeat of violence in Sudan was a reminder of the stakes in the escalating war. The Sudanese army bombed a hospital in Al Daein, a town in Darfur, killing at least 15 people, local news outlets reported. The R.S.F. shelled a warehouse belonging to the aid group Relief International in El Fasher.
At least 10 million Sudanese have fled their homes since the war started in April 2023. Over half the country’s 48 million people are acutely hungry, according to the United Nations.
During the talks, the diplomats also met twice with a group of 15 Sudanese women, who provided some suggestions that were taken on board. Some of the women, though, were less than enthusiastic about meeting representatives of countries accused of stoking the war.
“It was very challenging not to show our deep emotion,” said one young woman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect her security.
“We told them that this is not our war. We didn’t create it,” said the woman, who had recently left Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, where she volunteered in a hospital that the R.S.F. bombed recently, killing a friend. “It’s the responsibility of the countries that are feeding the conflict, by providing weapons to the fighters.”
After the meeting in Switzerland, there was a small reception with pizza, where the women and the mediators mingled uneasily, she said. “But nobody wanted to party.”