Sudan, Khartoum is a ghost town, 70% of the inhabitants have fled: but Emergency has opened a clinic there to treat children

KHARTOUM – After a year of war, Khartoum is devastated. Most homes, infrastructure and government institutions destroyed. The Sudanese capital of over six million inhabitants is at the end of its strength, 70% of its citizens have abandoned it to take refuge from the incessant bombing. For several weeks, almost all neighborhoods have been without electricity or telecommunications networks. In the large African city tormented by war, the hospitals that remain active can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

The conflict has spread. In the immensity of the Sudanese territory, the armed conflict has spread to the Darfur region in the west and to the central Kordofan region, where repeated indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population continue to be recorded. But most of the armed clashes are concentrated in Khartoum, which has turned into a ghost city. Due to the impossibility of operating under the bombings, EMERGENCY has been forced since the beginning of the war to close its pediatric center in Mayo – one of the three pediatric centers with which the NGO is active in the country – in addition to those in Nyala and Port Sudan – in a refugee camp near the capital which welcomes around 300,000 refugees and where the NGO has been active since 2005.

Difficult to get the drugs. “We decided to open a new pediatric clinic in Khartoum, within our ‘Salam’ cardiac surgery centre, in the Soba district, south of the capital – says Dr. Manuela Valenti, head of the pediatric division of EMERGENCY – it was a intense work, especially from a logistical point of view, but in two weeks we managed to open the centre, which has already been active since March 17th”. It is difficult to obtain visas, move around the country, and in light of the recent attacks in the Red Sea it is complicated to get medicines by ship, explained Manuela Valenti. The clinic was organized remotely by coordinating the operations from Milan, counting on the excellent local staff, very well trained from a technical point of view. “From a practical, logistical and operational point of view, we have a series of lists of drugs, depending on the type of business we are going to open, a series of standards regarding furnishings and laboratory tests – continues the doctor – I have to say that the local staff were excellent from a technical point of view, and the fantastic work of the logistics colleagues was, as always, immense. We never remember it enough, but when it comes to medicine, if they weren’t there to put the tools in our hands, we wouldn’t be able to work.”

There are 14 million children living on assistance. After decades of internal armed conflict, an almost thirty-year dictatorship and a sequence of coups, in mid-April last year a rivalry between army chief Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) Mohamad Hamdan Dagalo, has degenerated into a new civil war. In a country already destroyed by an endless conflict, twelve months were enough to cause one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in recent history, a new United Nations report shows. Of the 25 million people in need of humanitarian assistance, 14 million are children. Internally displaced people have reached the unprecedented figure of ten million, refugees are over one million. 700,000 children are affected by severe wasting and run a real risk of not surviving without the necessary care, while over three million children under the age of five suffer from acute malnutrition.

The composition of the EMERGENCY staff. There are currently two female doctors in the EMERGENCY clinic, a medical officer and a specialist in emergency medicine, while the pediatrician is waiting for permits to become operational. In addition to six nurses there are three health promoters, all coordinated by the head nurse Jasna Sundic, an EMERGENCY veteran who has been present in Sudan for some years. ‘In the space of a week the pediatric center has tripled the number of accesses, this week there were between 35 and 40 patients from zero to 14 years old per day, – explains Jasna Sundic – ‘most of the children are affected by diseases respiratory, gastroenteritis and malaria. We also visited some children who were malnourished due to lack of food.’ You still tell us, Jasna, about the lack of electricity, about the clinic functioning thanks to the constant use of generators, about the continuous roar of bombing in the rest of the city. Of the reclusive life of the EMERGENCY medical and paramedical staff of the Salam centre, around 100 Sudanese and expatriate staff: doctors, nurses, pharmacists and laboratory technicians. Accustomed as she is to life secluded in conflict zones, she doesn’t complain about being locked up in the hospital compound since last December.

That man holding a 7 month old baby girl. “We are at war and people with tragic stories come to the center – remembers Jasna – they tell us how difficult it was for them to reach us. The last story that struck me, three days ago. A young man arrived here with a seven-month-old baby girl. He said that his wife had been killed two hours earlier, in the middle of the street, and was asking for information on how to feed the baby. Her mother was still breastfeeding her. She was alone, she didn’t know what to do. Our health promoters instructed him on how to wean the baby while taking all hygienic precautions. As always, when you are at war everything around you is very sad.”

The economic costs of war. They are costs that threaten to plunge Sudan into a long-term state of poverty that could last for generations. According to recent UN reports, the fighting has blocked food transport and humanitarian aid, while the two opposing factions are using the food blockade as a weapon of war. Agricultural activities in much of the country have stopped and it is estimated that this is about to cause the largest food crisis in the world. A famine that could kill a million Sudanese. Although this war is far from the spotlight and forgotten by the international community, there have been repeated violations of war crimes and international humanitarian law. The thousands of people who lost their lives are, as is now usual in recent and current wars, largely civilians, with a proven majority of women and children.

War is not a destiny. As in all EMERGENCY projects, medical care for local patients is completely free, and it is reasonable to think that the pediatric clinic in Khartoum will probably have already significantly increased the number of its patients. If Gino Strada were still here, he would remind us that “Like diseases, war must also be considered a problem to be solved and not a destiny to be embraced”. He, who had seen wars face to face, stated that “they are all the same in their profound uselessness”. In his latest, beautiful book “One person at a time”, Gino Strada expresses his belief that the only way out is the abolition of all wars, without which this Planet cannot have a future. “The path forward is to abolish war,” Gino Strada said countless times. When he was accused of being a utopian, he replied firmly: “For me it is a compliment, not an insult.”