Shakir Elhassan was forced to leave everything with his wife and children when the war broke out in Sudan. Internally displaced, like millions of his compatriots, this worker at the non-governmental organization Care international denounced the “forgotten crisis” unfolding in his country, at a time when the danger of famine is looming.
He and his family initially left Khartoum for Wad Madani, 180 kilometers further south, after fighting began in April 2023 between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
In mid-December, however, this city, which had become a “humanitarian logistics center” for the region, according to the UN, became the target of attacks by paramilitaries. Elhassan recounts that he left “only with the clothes I was wearing”.
“On the street, thousands of people in a state of shock, mainly women and children, were running away on foot to escape,” he recalled speaking to AFP.
As a communications officer for Care International in Sudan, Shakir Elhassan had the harrowing experience of becoming internally displaced in his own country, along with his wife and three children.
In Kassala, the capital of the state of the same name located about 50 kilometers from the border with Eritrea where he now lives, he noticed the constant arrivals of displaced people “exhausted, hungry and sick”, forced to “live in makeshift shelters, without resources”.
In these conditions people are vulnerable to cholera or dengue epidemics.
Witnessing the “unprecedented needs” of the Sudanese, Elhassan denounces “a disaster forgotten” by the world.
They sold everything
Since April 15, when the head of the army, General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his deputy and head of the DTY, Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, launched the war, thousands of civilians have been killed. According to UN experts, 10,000 to 15,000 in Darfur city alone. Almost 8 million people, half of whom are children, have fled their homes.
More than half of Sudanese, around 25 million people, are in need of aid, of which 18 million are facing acute food insecurity, the UN says.
After ten months without a job and therefore without a salary, “people have sold everything they had,” in a country where inflation was already in triple digits before the war, observed William Carter, director of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) in Sudan. . The situation is deadlocked for the Sudanese, with “extremely high prices” and bakers “not producing even half the amount of products based on their capabilities as they have neither flour nor corn”.
After returning from Darfur, a region where ethnic conflict has raged for decades, Carter said he was “shocked” by the “food emergency” he saw there.
“If nothing is done, we are heading straight for famine,” the NGO Solidarites Internationales warned last week. “It will be the biggest humanitarian crisis that Sudan has ever known”, one of the poorest countries in the world, underlined Justine Music Pikemal, regional director of the NGO.
“If food is not imported through the humanitarian route, people will have nothing because there is nothing in the market,” he stressed. “People will die of hunger.”
In early February, Doctors Without Borders (MSF) had already pointed out that at least one child dies every two hours in the Zamzam camp in Darfur, where 300,000 to 500,000 displaced people live.
“Ultimate Evil”
“Children who are acutely malnourished and who have not yet died are at risk of dying within three to six weeks if they do not receive care,” the organization said.
According to Unicef, without additional international support, “tens of thousands of children are likely to die” in Sudan. “We risk losing an entire generation,” said Deepmala Mahla, Care International’s humanitarian director, in despair.
The UN’s humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, Clementine Nkweta-Salami, said in November that “I have no words to describe the horror that is unfolding there.” “What is happening is approaching absolute evil,” he noted, referring to children “in the middle of crossfire” or “little girls rushing in front of their mothers.”
“The Sudanese crisis has been completely forgotten,” complained Alice Verrier, Sudan envoy to Premiere Urgence Internationale.
The UN appealed in February for $4.1 billion to be raised by 2024 to address the humanitarian needs of Sudanese, both at home and in neighboring countries. In 2023, he collected only half the money he had requested.
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