Humanitarian Crisis in Sudan: International Aid Urgently Needed

“If the bullets don’t kill us, we will starve,” a Sudanese woman told NOS recently. Today marks exactly one year since the start of a new civil war in the country. Since then, ten million people have fled. Looting, sexual and racial violence is the order of the day and help from the international community is slow to arrive.

The UN estimated two months ago that $3.8 billion in emergency aid is needed. To date, only 5 percent of this has been funded.

Several countries are meeting in Paris today to discuss an aid package. More than 2 billion euros in aid have been pledged to Sudan, French President Macron said. DDistribution Minister Schreinemacher for Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation announced that the Netherlands is providing 10 million euros for emergency aid.

Five years ago, autocratic leader Omar al-Bashir was ousted after more than three decades in power. The coup was carried out by the regular Sudanese army SAF led by Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary group RSF of the wealthy general Hemedti.

Talks about transitioning from a military to a civilian system continued to fail. The parties failed to agree on the division of military power. The RSF refused to be under the command of the regular army.

On April 15, 2023, fighting broke out between the RSF and the SAF in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan where the Blue Nile and the White Nile meet.

Both parties are supported and opposed by several other militias. Millions of people are now displaced by that struggle. Only the number of deaths can be calculated. But according to the UN aid agency UNHCR, this amounts to tens of thousands.

According to the Red Cross, the conflict is not receiving too much attention due to other crises in the world, such as in the Middle East and Ukraine. Very little comes out about the situation in Sudan because international journalists hardly get access to it. Many Sudanese journalists have fled or are afraid to report for fear of being accused of taking sides.

Unicef says that malnutrition threatens the lives of nearly four million children. According to Doctors Without Borders, one of the few international aid groups still active there, in a refugee camp where they work, 15 percent of children between the ages of six months and two years are severely malnourished .

Although there is slow movement in the international community, the parties are still fighting non-stop a year later. In fact, the fighting near Khartoum seems to have increased in intensity.

The majority of refugees are internally displaced within Sudan. Hundreds of thousands have also fled to neighboring countries, especially South Sudan and Chad. The refugees who cross the border with Chad often come from the western region of Darfur, where many Sudanese of African descent suffer ethnic violence by Sudanese militias of Arab descent.

According to the Red Cross, 25 million people are needed. They need water, food and medicine. Hospitals have been closed due to the conflict. Because water pipes are broken, people have to drink from the rivers, which poses a high risk of illness.

Last year, our correspondent spoke to people from Darfur in a refugee camp, who told of the horrors there: