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Nearly 700,000 people have been forced to flee “ethnic cleansing” in the Darfur region of Sudan since the civil war erupted, making the current refugee crisis considerably worse than the one that captured international attention 20 years ago, according to the head of the Norwegian Refugee Council.
Jan Egeland, its secretary-general, said that the conflict, which began last April when the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces started fighting each other, had been largely ignored by the world, which had focused instead on the wars in Ukraine and Gaza.
“This is mind-boggling if you believe in human civilisation and progress,” Egeland told the Financial Times. He compared the limited amounts of money raised this time with the overwhelming response in 2003 and 2004 when large-scale violence in Darfur last erupted. Then, leaders such as US President George W Bush and Tony Blair, the UK prime minister, pushed the marginalised region to the top of the international agenda, he said.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has estimated that only 3.5 per cent of the $2.7bn requested to deal with Sudan crisis has been raised.
Egeland recently returned from visiting camps in neighbouring Chad where the displaced people have gathered. He said it was “gut wrenching to hear about the most horrific atrocities, much of it sexual violence against women . . . and the killing of young men en masse”. He called it “textbook ethnic cleansing” by Arab militia linked to the RSF.
Darfur became a major international focal point after an Arab militia known as the Janjaweed, the forerunners of the RSF, killed an estimated 200,000 people there between 2003 and 2005.
Antony Blinken, US secretary of state, in December accused members of the RSF, which is led by General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemeti, of crimes against humanity. Both the RSF and the Sudanese Armed Forces, headed by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, were guilty of war crimes, he said.
Egeland’s testimony echoes that of Martin Griffiths, head of OCHA, who recently told the FT that “Sudan is probably the place of the greatest suffering” in the world because of what he called a “hidden war”.
The fighting has left some 25mn people, more than half Sudan’s population, in need of aid, he said, with some 7mn displaced, according to estimates. The UN aid chief said he had spoken to the leaders of both the RSF and the army but that there was “no tangible” diplomatic progress.
The Sudan conflict is dangerously fragmenting, with disparate armed militias gaining strength, civilians taking up arms and signs that both the army and the RSF are losing control of their fighters, according to diplomats and analysts.
The UN estimates that at least 13,000 people have been killed, but the true number could be much higher. A leaked UN report estimated that the number of deaths in the Darfur city of El Geneina alone at 10,000-15,000.
Egeland said he could not confirm allegations, denied by the United Arab Emirates, that the Gulf state was helping rearm Hemeti’s forces, partly via Chad.
“I cannot verify that this or that Gulf nation fuels the fire with arms and resources,” he said. “However it’s very clear that those who commit atrocities and those who wage this senseless war do not lack resources, whereas we who try to save lives and protect civilians do. It’s a tremendous paradox of our age.”
