The war that broke out in Sudan between the Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023 has caused more than three million people to cross the border into neighbouring countries, according to a new count by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which would add to the eleven million internally displaced people in Sudanese territory – 8.8 million corresponding to the last 19 months.
A UNHCR spokesperson, Dominique Hyde, has denounced from Geneva “the unimaginable suffering, brutal atrocities and widespread violations of Human Rights” suffered by the Sudanese population, “without the world paying attention”. In October alone, some 60,000 Sudanese have arrived in Chad, as a result of the escalation of fighting in Darfur and also the floods.
They arrive “in desperate conditions, with nothing on them but memories of unimaginable violence,” Hyde said. 71 percent of the refugees have witnessed human rights violations, including murder, looting and sexual abuse, among other crimes. “Many remember the bodies they saw abandoned on the road when they fled,” she said.
The “pressure” is growing in Sudan’s neighbouring countries: more than 700,000 refugees have arrived in Chad, joining the more than 400,000 who already lived there, while Egypt has registered another 1.2 million. In addition, among the people who have left Sudan there are also citizens of third countries or returnees, as 650,000 South Sudanese have returned to South Sudan, “an extremely fragile country with enormous humanitarian shortcomings,” in the words of the UNHCR official.
“It is one of the world’s biggest emergencies, but one of the least reported and most underfunded,” he warned. Of the $1.5 billion (around 1.4 billion euros) requested for the aid plan for Sudanese refugees, only 29 percent has been raised.
