Drones Struck the Amiet Market, and No One Wants to Answer for the Massacre

A market. Food stalls, women selling, children running between the crates. On October 19, drones struck this place of ordinary life in Amiet, in the Abyei region. For Guang Cong, the UN Secretary-General's Special Envoy for the Horn of Africa, it is one of the deadliest attacks ever recorded in this area. Before the Security Council, he did not reach for diplomatic language to say so.

Let us ask the question that no one in Khartoum or Juba seems willing to face: who sent these machines, and who will answer for them? Today the official response fits in one sentence: the UN demands an independent investigation and the prosecution of the perpetrators. It is a just demand. It is also an admission that, for now, there is no identified culprit, no justice delivered, and not even a credible investigation under way. In a region where families bury their dead without knowing who killed them, impunity becomes a second violence.

Abyei is not an ordinary region. Straddling Sudan and South Sudan, it has been claimed by both countries for decades. The referendum planned for 2011 to settle its status never took place. Entire communities, notably the Ngok Dinka and the Misseriya, live on this disputed land, and every national crisis falls on it like an ember on dry straw. Today, the war between the Sudanese army and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), which has raged since April 2023, has crossed the administrative boundary of Abyei. The United Nations says it without hedging: the Sudanese conflict is now destabilizing the area.

The humanitarian figures speak for themselves. More than 50,000 refugees, returnees and asylum seekers have passed through Abyei on their way to South Sudan. Fifty thousand people: an entire city torn from its daily life, villages emptied, children walking without knowing where their family will sleep tonight. Behind every statistic is a mother who had to choose between carrying the cooking pot or her son's birth certificate. The UN is also raising the alarm over food shortages and a widening funding gap for aid, as needs explode. When aid money runs thin, it is always the poorest who pay the bill.

And we must name the machinery of this war. Drones do not fall from the sky. They are manufactured, sold, financed, and sometimes delivered through intermediaries whose supply chains escape the control of African parliaments. UN expert reports on Sudan have documented, in recent years, flows of weapons and drones feeding the belligerents, with allegations implicating actors in the Gulf among others. These are serious accusations that must be verified, not brushed aside. But they raise a question we can no longer avoid: who benefits from the war lasting, and how much does it earn for those who sell it?

Our continent has already seen this film. In the 2000s, external partners proclaimed their attachment to democracy and human rights while looking away from massacres whenever economic interests were at stake. Today, the new scramble for Africa brings together Western powers, China, Russia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Each arrives with its promises, its investments, its arms. None asks, before signing, whether the civilians of Amiet were protected. The result is the same as under colonialism: resources leave, populations pay, and elites collect.

African leaders also bear an immense share of this responsibility. A state that does not investigate the bombing of its own citizens, a government that lets corruption devour security budgets, a regime that hides behind the rhetoric of sovereignty to refuse all oversight: such a state does not protect its sovereignty. It sells it to the highest bidder, at the price of its people's blood.

Yet there are paths forward. Botswana built its prosperity on transparent institutions, rigorous management of its mineral wealth, and stable rules. Mauritius built a credible rule of law, with an independent judiciary and peaceful alternation of power. Senegal showed in 2024 that a people, its judges and its institutions could refuse an electoral power grab and enforce respect for the Constitution. These countries are not perfect. But they prove that credible governance is not a luxury reserved for the rich: it is the precondition for peace and growth.

What we must demand today is clear. The Security Council must establish an independent commission of inquiry into the Amiet strikes, with real access to the ground and a public mandate. If Khartoum and Juba refuse to cooperate, the Council must consider referring the matter to the International Criminal Court, as it did for Darfur in 2005 with Resolution 1593. The African Union, which has a duty to defend peace on our continent, must stop treating Sudan as a peripheral file and strengthen its mediation, with follow-up mechanisms that go beyond communiqués. The United Nations Interim Security Force for Abyei must have the means to protect civilians and document violations.

States must also publish their arms contracts and the origins of the drones used on their soil. Transparency is not a favor: it is a right of peoples. Donors must condition their aid on public oversight of its distribution, so that food reaches families and not the pockets of intermediaries. And national judicial institutions must be shielded from all political pressure, because without independent judges, no justice holds.

And we, African citizens, what must we do? We must refuse silence. Demand that our parliamentarians question their governments about arms sales. Support the journalists and NGOs who document these crimes, instead of leaving them alone in the face of threats. Sign, share, demand that an investigation be opened. Every time a massacre passes unnoticed, another one becomes possible.

Amiet is not a statistical detail. It is a market where people were trying to feed their families. The least we owe these victims is that their names be spoken, that their killers be identified, and that never again will a drone strike a market without someone having to answer for it. If we let this one pass, we accept the next.

Based on reporting by ACSS-EMAIL