War-torn Sudan risks becoming another failed state as civil society is disintegrating amid a rapid rise in armed groups, the head of a leading international aid agency says. with BBC.
As well as the two main warring parties in Sudan – the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces – there are many smaller “national armies” that loot and “go berserk” at civilians, said Jan Egeland, the head Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), said.
“The parties are destroying their own homes, they are slaughtering their own people,” he said.
For 19 months, there has been a brutal power struggle between the army and the RSF, forcing more than 10 million people from their homes and pushing the country to the brink of famine.
“Everything I see confirms that this is truly the biggest humanitarian emergency that we are looking at, the biggest famine crisis, the biggest humanitarian crisis,” Mr. Egeland said after his trip to Sudan. largest displacement”.
In September, the World Health Organization (WHO) said hunger in Sudan was “nearly everywhere.”
Soup kitchens have been forced to close due to lack of capital. Egeland said the lack of humanitarian response meant remaining aid resources were simply “slowing down rather than stopping them”.
“Most of Sudan is starving, it is starving,” he said, adding that famine has been used as a method of war.
Some food security experts fear that up to 2.5 million people could die of starvation by the end of the year.
Mr. Egeland warned that the world is “completely failing Sudan” by not doing enough.
He told the BBC if Europe wanted to avoid a refugee crisis it needed to invest in “aid, protection and peace in this corner of the world”.
“It’s an underfunded operation, even though it’s the world’s biggest emergency,” he said.
Thousands of people have died since the civil war broke out. Human rights groups have also expressed concern that ethnic cleansing could occur genocide in Sudan.
Despite this, peace negotiations between the RSF and the army remained fruitless.
“War will stop when these warlords feel they have more to lose by continuing to fight than by doing what makes sense,” Egeland said.
