Chris Houston: Urgent need for peace in Sudan
Last month, the International Rescue Committee described fallout from continuing warfare in Sudan as the top global humanitarian emergency. On Aug. 28, MSNBC commentator Lawrence O’Donnell described it as the “least reported humanitarian crisis on the planet.”
Levon Sevunts, a former journalist working for the UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, granted me a recent interview upon returning from neighboring Chad.
He said, “For me, this was an absolutely surreal experience to be back in Chad, almost 20 years to the day after I went to Chad as a Canadian journalist covering the conflict in Darfur, (and) seeing the same stories, the same refugees, only on a much bigger scale.”
Noting Chad is currently hosting more than 630,000 refugees from Sudan, he said, “The stories I heard from speaking to Sudanese women refugees, who had seen members of their families executed in front of their eyes, of women who told me about worrying about how they’re going to feed their kids, worried every time they went fetching wood beyond the security of the camp that they would get raped or assaulted — worried, but they had to do this anyway because they needed to feed their families.”
Sevunts was stationed in Adré, lying just on the Chadian side of the border. It is the place where most of the refugees crossed, fleeing the violence.
“I was speaking with my colleagues about the kind of cases they were seeing,” he said, “and they were saying there is a big difference now, because in the initial months, when the conflict started in mid-April — especially around June, when the violence spread in Darfur — they were seeing a lot of people coming in with injuries and gunshot wounds.”
He told me, “What you are seeing now is that a lot of people are coming in extremely malnourished.
“This is basically a man-made food crisis. Because of the war, farmers are not able to plant in their fields; they have missed one planting season already, their crops were burned, and their livestock were destroyed or taken away from them.
“You have this incredible humanitarian situation inside Sudan, but it’s also playing out on the Chadian side of the border, because before the war, this part of Chad used to get most of its food imports from Sudan. Now it’s vice versa.”
That has serious ramifications, Sevunts said, explaining, “So now they have to truck food all the way from Libya, because the area doesn’t provide enough food for the population. Food is trucked all the way through the Sahara Desert, all the way from Libya, south to Chad, and from Chad, some of it goes to Sudan.
“This means that prices have jumped. So not only do humanitarian agencies have to buy items from local markets, but the prices of things at the market have gone up because of the logistical difficulties that the war has created.”
Sevunts said it’s not just the refugees who are suffering. It’s also local residents worried about putting food on the table for their own families.
But the refugees are getting the worst of it. He said many of them have been displaced time and again.
“They flee to one city or region that they think is safe,” he said, “and then a couple of months later, war spreads to that region, and they have to flee again.”
He called on the international community to step in with immediate humanitarian assistance. But he said, “What they really need is peace in Sudan, because unless there is a lasting ceasefire with peace talks, this conflict threatens not only to destroy Sudan as a functioning state, but it also threatens to destabilize the entire region.”
Chris Houston is a Canadian journalist. He writes a column distributed through PeaceVoice in the U.S.
Comments