Nearly 11 months of war in Sudan has shattered millions of lives and created one of the world's largest displacement crises. The humanitarian emergency also risks becoming the world's largest hunger crisis if the fighting does not stop, warned United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) Executive Director Cindy McCain on Wednesday as she concluded a visit to South Sudan, where she met families fleeing violence and an escalating hunger emergency in Sudan.
The scale of the humanitarian catastrophe unfolding in Sudan is unprecedented. The number of people in need of humanitarian assistance in the country now stands at 24.8 million - half of Sudan's population. Among them are 14 million children.
“The war in Sudan risks triggering the world’s largest hunger crisis,” McCain warned.
“20 years ago, Darfur was the world’s largest hunger crisis and the world rallied to respond. But today, the people of Sudan have been forgotten. Millions of lives and the peace and stability of an entire region are at stake,” she said.
Fighting erupted in April last year between Sudan's army chief, General Abdel Fattah Burhan, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who commands the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The two generals were once allies in Sudan's transitional government following a coup in 2021, but have become rivals for power amid a stalled transition to elections and a civilian-led government.
More than 25 million people in Sudan, South Sudan and Chad are trapped in a spiral of deteriorating food security. In Sudan alone, more than 17.7 million people are experiencing high levels of acute food insecurity, facing crisis levels or worse, including nearly 4.9 million people facing emergency levels of hunger.
90 percent of people experiencing emergency levels of hunger in Sudan are trapped in areas that are largely inaccessible to WFP and other aid agencies.
WFP said it is unable to deliver sufficient emergency food assistance to desperate communities caught up in the fighting in Sudan because of relentless violence and obstruction by the warring parties.
Humanitarian assistance was further disrupted after Sudanese authorities revoked permits for cross-border truck convoys, forcing the UN agency to halt its operations from neighboring Chad into Sudan's Darfur region.
Since August, more than one million people in West and Central Darfur had received WFP assistance through this lifeline, and the UN agency was in the process of scaling up to support that number each month as hunger and malnutrition continue to skyrocket in Darfur.
More than ten months into the war between the SAF and the RSF in the capital, Khartoum, more than 8.5 million people have been forced to flee their homes and seek refuge inside and outside Sudan.
At least 6.6 million of those displaced are inside Sudan, while more than 1.9 million others have sought refuge in other countries. Nearly 1.7 million of these have fled across borders into the five neighboring countries of South Sudan, Chad, Ethiopia, Egypt and the Central African Republic.
In total, more than 12 million people are now displaced by conflict inside and outside the country, making Sudan one of the two largest displacement crises in the world, alongside the civil war in Syria.
Meanwhile, more people are fleeing into South Sudan and Chad, stretching the humanitarian response to breaking point.
McCain traveled to Renk in eastern South Sudan, where nearly 600,000 people have crossed from Sudan in the past 10 months. The WFP chief visited the overcrowded transit camps, where families arrive hungry and are met with more hunger.
Newly arrived displaced people in South Sudan account for 35 percent of those facing catastrophic levels of hunger - the highest possible level - despite making up less than 3 percent of the population. In addition, one in five children in transit centers at the main border crossing is malnourished.
With current resources, WFP says it is struggling to keep up with the significant level of need. “I met mothers and children who have fled for their lives not once, but multiple times, and now hunger is closing in on them,” said the WFP Executive Director.
“The consequences of inaction go far beyond a mother unable to feed her child and will shape the region for years to come. Today I am making an urgent plea for the fighting to stop, and that all humanitarian agencies must be allowed to do their life-saving work.”
WFP urgently needs unimpeded access in Sudan to address the escalating food insecurity, which will have significant long-term impacts on the region, along with an injection of funding to respond to the spread of the humanitarian crisis to neighboring countries.
Ultimately, the UN agency said, a cessation of hostilities and lasting peace is the only way to reverse course and prevent catastrophe.
In another development, a senior US official urged countries Wednesday to stop supplying Sudan’s rival generals with weapons for their civil war, saying they are fueling “death, destruction and depravity.”
“A conflict that, as this report details, is being fueled by arms transferred from a handful of regional powers — arms transfers that must stop,” US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters.
She was speaking of the final report of the five-member panel of experts on Sudan, who are mandated by the Security Council to report on the implementation of council sanctions. That report was published this week.
Thomas-Greenfield described the report’s findings as “stomach-churning” and said it detailed “atrocity after atrocity after atrocity.”
The 52-page report, completed in mid-January, said both the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) and the rebel Rapid Support Forces had the financial means to finance their war, noting that they control most of Sudan's gold trade.
While the SAF began the war in good economic shape, the panel found that the group has lost control of some key economic sectors and businesses, and now relies largely on wealthy businessmen to purchase military equipment for its troops.
The RSF funds its operations in part through fees it charges people for safe passage and protection of convoys passing through areas it controls in Sudan's Darfur region, where much of the fighting has taken place.
RSF has also developed new supply lines for its fighters, smuggling weapons, ammunition, fuel and vehicles into Sudan through eastern Chad, southern Libya and South Sudan. The panel found that from July, the RSF began using several types of heavy and sophisticated weapons that it did not have at the start of the war.
“This new RSF firepower had a massive impact on the balance of forces, both in Darfur and other regions of the Sudan,” the panel wrote. “New heavy artillery enabled RSF to swiftly take over Nyala and El Geneina, while its new anti-aircraft devices helped to counter the main asset of SAF, namely, its air force.”
The panel said that since June, various flight-tracking experts have observed numerous cargo aircraft departing from Abu Dhabi International Airport in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and arriving at Amdjarass International Airport in eastern Chad, with stops in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda. They said the information they gathered confirmed media reports that the aircraft were carrying weapons, ammunition and medical equipment for RSF.
The experts asked the UAE for a response. The government denied any involvement in the transfer of weapons and ammunition and said its flights were carrying humanitarian aid for displaced Sudanese. A similar request by the panel to Chad went unanswered.
The experts said the SAF has used aerial bombardment and heavy shelling in urban areas in Darfur, causing a large-scale humanitarian crisis.
The UN human rights office says at least 14,600 people have been killed and 26,000 others injured, although the real toll is likely much higher. In their report, the experts say at least 10,000 to 15,000 people have been killed in El Geneina, Darfur, by RSF and allied militias alone.
“RSF and allied militias targeted gathering sites for internally displaced persons, civilian neighborhoods and medical facilities and committed sexual violence against women and girls,” the report said.
The experts detailed horrific conflict-related sexual violence, particularly by the RSF in Darfur, often ethnically targeted against women and girls between the ages of 9 and 75, often from the Masalit community.
The panel said RSF snipers also indiscriminately targeted civilians, including pregnant women and young people, and their bodies were often left to decompose in the streets for fear of being targeted while retrieving them.
Some information for this report provided by VOA.
Further information
Full text: Sudan’s war risks creating the world’s largest hunger crisis, warns WFP Chief, WFP, news release, published March 6, 2024
https://www.wfp.org/news/sudans-war-risks-creating-worlds-largest-hunger-crisis-warns-wfp-chief
Full text: UN Security Council: Final report of the Panel of Experts on the Sudan, S/2024/65, dated January 15, 2024, released March 4, 2024
https://documents.un.org/api/symbol/access?j=N2400564