“Imagine you had a good comfortable life and now you have to live this way looking for food and water,” says 18-year-old Sudanese refugee Mayaz Osman Ababker, who wants to be a doctor.
In the desert in east Chad there is a city of refugees: 237,000 people, about the population of Cork city, live in an ad hoc camp of huts made of straw on the border with Sudan. They have experienced the worst things people can experience – the murder of loved ones, rape and torture.
Sudan’s latest war is two years old this week. It’s the worst humanitarian crisis in the world. When the Sudanese people ousted longtime autocrat Omar Al Bashir in 2019, it looked like they were on the brink of democracy. But such hopes vanished. Since April 15th, 2023, they have been caught up in a violent power struggle between Abdel Fattah Al Burhan, leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, leader of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF). Both groups were previously allies and aligned to Al Bashir. Dagalo’s faction has its origins in the Janjaweed militia, which is responsible for the worst atrocities during the Darfur crisis of 2003-2008.
Since 2023 it is estimated that 150,000 have been killed, while 12 million have been displaced – 760,000 of whom have crossed the 1,403km border Sudan shares with Chad, triggering a new emergency of similar proportions there. The new refugees are in addition to the 430,000 people who came during the earlier Darfur crisis. About 237,000 of the new arrivals are living in this unofficial site in the town of Adre, but Chad’s government and aid groups want them to move to official settlements further into the country for their own safety.
Both armies are heavily funded by rival international powers – the SAF by Russia, Iran and Egypt; and the RSF by the United Arab Emirates. But humanitarian aid efforts in this proxy war are severely underfunded. This is being further exacerbated by the recent US aid funding cuts. The 2024 refugee response plan of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was funded at only at 30 per cent of what was needed.
“This year, we are already in April, and it is funded at only 7 per cent or 8 per cent,” says Jerome Merlin, deputy representative for the UNHCR in Chad. “People are still coming. We are not at the end of the crisis ... We anticipate 250,000 new arrivals.”
The majority of refugees are women and children. Most are Masalit people who are being “ethnically cleansed”, murdered and raped by the RSF who dominate Sudan’s West Darfur state. Young Masalit men enjoy less freedom and have been tortured and killed. Since losing the Sudanese capital Khartoum to the SAF last month, the RSF is doubling down on its dominance in this region. The exodus c...
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