“It is beyond belief that we have a fraction of the interest now for Sudan’s crisis than we had 20 years ago for Darfur, when the crisis was actually much smaller,” head of the Norwegian Refugee Council, Jan Egeland, said.
Altaghyeer: Agencies
War-torn Sudan is on a countdown to famine ignored by world leaders while humanitarian aid is only delaying deaths, Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) chief Jan Egeland said on Saturday.
“we have the biggest humanitarian crisis on the planet in Sudan, the biggest hunger crisis, the biggest displacement crisis… and the world is giving it a shrug,” he told AFP in an interview from neighbouring Chad after a visit to Sudan this week.
Since April 2023, the Sudan is devastated by a war between the Sudanese Armed Forces, led by head of current status quo government Abdel-Fattah Al-Burhan, and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces led by his former deputy Mohamed Hamdan Daglo “Hemedti”.
Tens of thousands of civilians have been killed in the war, more than 11,000 have been displaced and nearly 26 million of people are suffering acute hunger.
The NRC says some 1.5 million people in Sudan are on the brink of famine.
“I met women barely surviving, eating one meal of boiled leaves a day,” Egeland said.
“The violence is tearing apart communities much faster than we can come in with aid,” Egeland said.
“As we struggle to keep up, our current resources are merely delaying deaths instead of preventing them.”
“It is beyond belief that we have a fraction of the interest now for Sudan’s crisis than we had 20 years ago for Darfur, when the crisis was actually much smaller,” Egeland said.
He said he detected a shift in the “international mood”, away from the kind of celebrity-driven campaigns that brought Hollywood star George Clooney to Darfur in the 2000s.
“More nationalistic tendencies, more inward-looking,” he said of Western governments led by politicians compelled to “put my nation first, me first, not humanity first. It will come to haunt these short-sighted leaders, when those they failed to assist in their homeland join the tide of refugees and migrants headed north, Egeland warned.
Most of those displaced are in Darfur, where Egeland says the situation is “horrific and getting worse”.
But even areas spared the devastation of war “are bursting at the seams,” Egeland said.
Across the army-controlled east, camps, schools and other public buildings are filled with displaced people left to fend for themselves.
On the outskirts of Port Sudan, the Red Sea city where the army-backed government and UN agencies are now based, Egeland said he visited a school sheltering more than 3,700 displaced people where mothers were unable to feed their children.
“How come next door to the easiest accessible part of Sudan… there is starvation?” he asked.
According to the UN, both sides are using hunger as a weapon of war. Authorities routinely impede access with bureaucratic hurdles, while paramilitary fighters have threatened and attacked aid workers.
“The ongoing starvation is a man-made tragedy… Each delay, every blocked truck, every authorisation delayed is a death sentence for families who can’t wait another day for food, water and shelter,” Egeland said.
But in spite of all the obstacles, “it is possible to reach all corners of Sudan,” he said, calling on donors to increase funding and aid organisations to have more “guts”.
“Parties to conflicts specialise in scaring us and we specialise in being scared,” he said, urging UN and other agencies to be tougher and demand access.
