Sudanese refugee crisis: Fighting between regular army and paramilitary rapid intervention forces has dangerous human consequences. Hundreds of thousands of refugees!
Sudanese refugee crisis
Deadly fighting in Sudan has displaced more than 330,000 people inside the country, and another 100,000 have already fled to countries in the region, the United Nations reported on Tuesday, May 2. In all, “more than 800,000 people” could flee the country, the UN estimates.
The 2023 Sudanese refugee crisis began in Africa in mid-April 2023 after the outbreak of the 2023 Sudanese conflict. By May 12, 2023, over 200,000 people had fled the country and over a million had been internally displaced.
These included diplomats, citizens and foreign nationals from countries such as Somalia, Eritrea, Brazil, the USA, the UK, Kenya and Uganda. Thousands more were displaced, mainly from Khartoum.
Sudanese refugee crisis
On April 24, 2023, several countries, including Chad and South Sudan, reported the presence of several thousand civilians, some arriving by bus, car or on foot in extremely dangerous conditions.
In Chad, the situation is critical
Sudanese refugee crisis
The influx of Sudanese refugees entering Chad, 80% of whom are women and children, has been happening so fast that it’s testing international efforts to provide them with shelter, food and drinking water.
Ali Salam, a Chadian-American working with the Sudanese Association of American Physicians (SAPA), tells the Guardian that conditions in a refugee camp in Koufroun are “overwhelming”.
The rainy season, which starts at the end of June, will turn the region’s dirt roads into mudslides, further complicating the delivery of aid to those in need, and causing a rise in cases of malaria and other diseases, according to aid agencies.
“We know we won’t be able to relocate them all before the rainy season,” Pierre Kremer of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) tells Reuters. “We run the risk of a major humanitarian catastrophe in this region.
Disastrous economic situation
Chad, a landlocked country, depends on Sudan for access to international markets for foodstuffs, refined oil products and other imports. The fighting has complicated this system, exacerbating the fuel shortages that began in early March and driving up food prices.
According to the Observatory for Economic Complexity, the closure of the border with Sudan has caused prices to rise by up to 70%. In Chad’s capital, high inflation has caused major problems for shopkeepers and their customers alike, as the economic fallout from the fighting in Sudan influences the price of everything, including the red tea prized by Chadians.
Chad requests international aid
On Saturday June 24, Chad, where tens of thousands of new refugees are fleeing the war in Sudan, called for “massive aid” from the international community, which it accuses of “leaving it almost alone” in the face of an “unprecedented” humanitarian crisis.
Prime Minister Saleh Kebzabo told diplomats and representatives of international organizations on Saturday that “the mobilization of the international community (…) is not on a par with the mobilization seen elsewhere, leaving Chad almost alone in the face of hosting refugees, while exhausting its own resources to the maximum”.
Sudanese refugees between a rock and a hard place in the Central African Republic
For the past eight weeks, Sudan’s civil war has been turning the country upside down. Fleeing the fighting in Darfur, ten thousand refugees have taken refuge in the north of the Central African Republic.
While the fate of these shipwrecked warriors has caused a stir, more than 10,000 people have found themselves in an even more precarious situation in Amdafock. This small Central African village on the border with Darfur has been the scene of a drama behind closed doors since mid-April.
Sudanese refugee crisis
Life here is hard. No water, no electricity, no shelter for those shipwrecked – mostly women, children and the elderly – by the violence that continues to shake neighboring Darfur, bringing in hundreds of new arrivals every day.
Humanitarian assistance to date has been insufficient to cope with the influx. Bandits and armed groups lurk nearby. The security stakes are high. Here, the border only exists on paper, and with the exception of a few undermanned peacekeepers, no one is protecting the locality. At the end of May, the vehicle of an international NGO was attacked on the road, killing one person.
Egypt: government restricts entry conditions for Sudanese refugees
Sudanese refugee crisis
Egypt is tightening entry formalities for Sudanese nationals. Their country has been torn apart for almost two months by a deadly war that has led to a serious humanitarian crisis.
In a statement published on Sunday June 11, the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced new procedures. The aim is to “establish a regulatory framework for the entry of Sudanese brothers into Egypt after more than 50 days of crisis” in their country.
Egypt has welcomed more than 200,000 Sudanese citizens since the start of the crisis” two months ago, according to local authorities. They add that these recently arrived refugees “are in addition to the five million Sudanese citizens already present in the country before the war”.
These restrictive measures are not intended to “prevent or limit the number of Sudanese citizens entering” Egyptian territory, but rather to put an end to the “illegal activities of individuals and groups on the Sudanese side of the border, who falsify entry visas” for profit, explains the statement.
Darfur again threatened by “ethnic cleansing
Both the United Nations and human rights organizations have been warning in recent weeks of the proliferation of attacks in the region against civilians based on their ethnicity.
The international organization’s special representative for Sudan, Volker Perthes, recently warned that some of these attacks could potentially constitute “crimes against humanity”.
The New York Times recently reported, based on the testimony of refugee survivors in Chad, that snipers had been positioned to shoot down fleeing civilians.
On Tuesday, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) expressed its alarm at the situation in Darfur, pointing out that the fighting was intensifying and that “the ethnic dimension seen in the past is unfortunately returning”.
A crisis that drags on
The conflict in Sudan could join the long list of forgotten regional and international crises. A number of factors support this hypothesis, which is not to everyone’s displeasure. Firstly, the unbridled nature of the parties to the conflict, dominated by the desire for revenge and the quest for a decisive military victory over the two generals, who do not seem to have any intention of ceasing their actions, at least in the foreseeable future.
These crimes against civilian facilities such as airports, hospitals, schools, water points and the like are not the only evidence of the disaster that has befallen Sudan. The worst has been confirmed, especially after the collapse of the ceasefire and the suspension of talks in Jeddah announced by the Saudi and American mediators, accusing both sides of failing to respect the ceasefire and hindering aid and appeasement measures.
The perpetuation of the conflict in Sudan risks extending the fighting scenario beyond the country’s major cities. It could spread to other regions and neighboring countries, exacerbating existing insecurity and the causes of tension and conflict. The result would be humanitarian crises and a wave of refugees, outstripping the capacity of countries in the region to cope with such challenges.