12 million people fly. Even to Chad

Huda A. was heavily pregnant and fell to the ground when a bomb hit the house next door, killing four children. At that moment she decided to fly. And she did not let herself be dissuaded from this plan, even when she gave birth to a baby a few days later that was far too weak to cry.

In the middle of the night, she, her husband and their seven children squeezed into their neighbor’s SUV and drove off from the Sudanese city of Omdurman towards Chad. It is 1,400 kilometers to the border that will save them. It took them three months to get here, to the refugee camp in the desert city of Adré.

Now the 35-year-old nurse is sitting in the mud. The shelter that she and her husband had to build out of branches and plastic sheeting does not offer enough protection from the floodwaters in the middle of the rainy season. But they are safe from the gunfire and bombs. Finally. But the hunger has remained. And so has the fear of death. The doctors have found a hole in her baby’s heart. The little boy has less than six months left, they say.

For seventeen months, the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) have been fighting against the ruling Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). It is currently the most brutal war in the world, the largest humanitarian crisis, a gigantic Somalia.

Tens of thousands have died in the fighting, and many more are dying as a result of crop failures and a lack of medical care. It is now estimated that 150,000 people have died. At the same time, around ten million people have been displaced. Two million have fled to fragile neighboring countries, primarily to Chad, one of the poorest countries in the world.

Here, on the border with Sudan, there are now 780,000 refugees spread across around eight camps, mostly women, children, but also men. Huda’s eyes are tear-stained, her steps heavy. She belongs to the Massalit, an ethnic group in Sudan’s western region of Darfur who are quickly becoming small farmers and against whom the RSF has been committing enormous massacres since the war began. Not for the first time: In 2003, when Arab-influenced herders wanted to resolve their land conflict with African farmers with mass murder and expulsion, the whole world looked at Darfur. This time the world is looking away. Politicians are not interested. The available funds for humanitarian aid are far too low.

Huda and her family arrived at this so-called transit camp on the outskirts of Adré a few weeks ago. From here, they were supposed to be transferred to camps with better infrastructure and accommodation. But the authorities and aid organizations are completely overwhelmed by the crowds of people.

Many have been stuck here for over a year, trying to build a kind of home for themselves with tarpaulins made from aid packages and bricks. They are trying to help each other out of this horror by keeping everything clean and sharing the scarce food rations with new arrivals like Huda. Until her registration is complete, she cannot receive anything. “I thank God that I was able to leave the war,” she says, “but hunger is still with us here.”

1100 calories per day

The United Nations World Food Programme recently had to reduce the rations to 1,100 calories per person per day. 2,000 calories would be the minimum. Here in Adré, the last time grain, pulses, oil and salt were distributed was in mid-August. Some families say that the monthly deliveries have not been arriving regularly for a long time. In Aboutengue, another refugee camp, residents report that they have not received any new monthly rations since July.

The rainy season has made it difficult to transport goods. Trucks can only move slowly on the washed-out clay roads, and planes have to land under difficult conditions. The UN now wants to start making cash payments to the refugees, but there are concerns that the market will become overloaded. This would lead to price increases for the local population. And thus to conflict.

In the shadow of the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, donor countries are severely neglecting this emergency aid. Together with the United Nations, only 40 percent of the aid measures for the Sudanese population are financially covered. And the neighboring countries also lack money to support the refugees. Rarely has such a major disaster been so ignored.

Tortured, abused, mutilated

According to the United Nations Human Rights Council, both warring parties are committing human rights violations. Human Rights Watch reports that people on both sides are being tortured and mistreated, and bodies are being mutilated.

This type of violence also threatened Huda and her family when they were attacked by RSF fighters on their way to Chad a few weeks ago. The men stole the petrol. Then they asked if they were Massalit. If they had said yes, they would have been killed. Such checkpoints were death traps, especially for Massalit men, as many of them were still fighting with the state army against the RSF at the beginning of the war. “No, we are Tama, not Massalit,” Huda’s husband claimed. Because none of the patrols could speak the Tama accent, they survived.

In the refugee camp in Chad, another man from the persecuted ethnic group shows videos of RSF atrocities on his cell phone. Men with machine guns, in the background thousands flying in front of them. Men who murder. Or men who force the wounded to dig their own graves and insult them as “slaves” shortly before they die. “These murderers shared this on Facebook accounts,” says the refugee, who hopes for justice and international criminal courts.

According to the UN, 216,000 people are now living in the transit camp in Adré alone. And although the conditions have become even more precarious due to the persistent rain, the organization is not providing accommodation or building materials. This will prevent a permanent camp from being built here. Adré is only two kilometers from the border with Darfur. You can even hear the bombing raids that Sudan’s air force carries out every few weeks. Refugee camps must not be built too close to war-torn countries; a minimum distance of 30 kilometers applies. The government of Chad will also prevent the conflict from spilling over the border or fighters from being recruited in the camps.

This has led to criticism: “The UN should have taken action in the face of the catastrophe,” says an experienced emergency worker, especially as the situation is becoming increasingly dramatic. For a few weeks now, trucks carrying grain deliveries have been allowed to cross the border with Sudan, but after the floods they are only moving at walking pace, if at all. It takes many hours to reach the first paved road. And aid flights have also had to be cancelled due to the volume of water.

Now, of all times, the UN has declared a famine in North Darfur. For the first time in seven years. The RSF did not want to allow humanitarian aid into the areas under their control because the grain deliveries could also be used to smuggle weapons to the enemy. The countless flatbed trucks that transport gasoline from Chad to the RSF troops in Darfur, however, were allowed through.

Back in Adré, an employee of Doctors Without Borders (MSF) is struggling to keep her composure. She has just returned from Darfur, where she visited the university hospital in the town of al-Geneina. Before the war, it was the most important hospital in the region. Now it is one of the few that is still in operation. MSF runs a children’s ward there. But everything is missing, she says: water and electricity, medicines and equipment.

80 percent of the health facilities have collapsed. The employees have not received a salary for 16 months. They continue to work, despite the fact that there have been targeted attacks on clinics in recent months. Rarely has a crisis of this magnitude been so underfunded, says the aid worker, and the international community must do more: “Every day of inaction costs many human lives.”

But the medical conditions in the camps are also precarious. These days, malaria prophylaxis is being distributed to the skinny children, while the parents tell stories of unimaginable suffering. Of relatives and friends being killed in droves, of rape and torture.

And yet, at the border, you can see how the flow of refugees drives some people back to Sudan for a few hours. They buy charcoal, which is banned in Chad and can therefore be sold for a profit.

The men of the Massalit ethnic group say that they would be killed immediately by the RSF in Sudan. The Massalit women risk being raped. But they are usually left alive. So they are the ones who leave.

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