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Sudan faces one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. There are so many deaths in the civil war that they can no longer be counted. One day before the report on hunger came out, the country left the monitoring system… afraid of the results.
United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) confirmed the delivery of the supplies through a message on its Telegram social network account to which Lusa had access.
“Our trucks, part of a convoy from UNICEF and the World Food Programme, together with Doctors Without Borders and the Khartoum Emergency Response Room, delivered vital health and nutritional supplies to Al Bashayer Hospital and primary health care centers in Yebel Aulia, Khartoum,” UNICEF said.
According to the statement, this is “the first shipment to arrive south of Khartoum since the start of the war in April 2023“.
“We see positive progress in the interest of humanitarian work”, the organization also assured, cited by Lusa, calling on all parties to “make this step a starting point for broader coordination humanitarian response and for the creation of permanent humanitarian efforts”.
Sudan has been facing, for 20 months, one of the worst civil wars ever. According to , tens of thousands of people were killed, 12 million were killed and, with the country on the brink of famine, more than half of its 48 million citizens suffer from acute.
“Things look set to get much worse for civilians in the new year.”he also says Kholood Khaira Sudanese political analyst who runs the think tank Confluence Advisory.
“There is no simple binary between the good and the bad of the tape that the attention of the media and the public usually yearns to understand these types of situations”, he also states Michael Jonesresearcher at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).
Although it is difficult to count the thousands of deaths caused by the war, estimates presented in November pointed to more than 61,000 dead only in Khartoum state.
According to another BBC article from early November, the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, whose figures are considered reliable by the UN, rrecorded a death toll of more than 43,300 people us last 13 months.
The war in Sudan has long surpassed Gaza in terms of mortality.
In fact, the leader of the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF), General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the commander of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti, were once allies. Now, they are the protagonists of one of the bloodiest wars in recent decades.
In October 2021, the two leaders seized power in a joint coup, dashing Sudanese hopes for a civilian-led government, several years after a peaceful revolution toppled dictator Omar al-Bashir. Based on shaky foundations, the generals’ alliance quickly fell apart due to clash of ambitions between the two men and their forces.
According to kahir, the Sudanese civil war should be seen as “a war against civilians”, in which both the SAF and the RSF are guilty of harming the Sudanese population and failing to properly open aid corridors.
Incalculable hunger (literally)
According to UNICEF, more than half of Sudan’s 48 million citizens suffer from acute food insecurity.
However, as Reuters reports, the Sudanese government suspended its participation in the global hunger control system on the eve of a report which should show that hunger is spreading across the country.
The report released this week therefore does not include Sudanese data. A letter from the government’s Ministry of Agriculture accused the Integrated Food Safety Phase Classification (IPC) system of “issue unreliable reports that undermine the sovereignty and dignity of Sudan”.
“Removing the IPC system will not change the reality of hunger on the ground,” said an NGO source. “But deprives the international community of its compass to navigate Sudan’s hunger crisis. Without independent analysis, we are flying blind into this storm of food insecurity.”
“It is part of a long history of famine denial by the Sudanese government, dating back more than 40 years,” he said. Alex de Waal, one of the world’s leading hunger experts at the World Peace Foundation. “Whenever there is famine in Sudan, they consider it an affront to their sovereignty and they are more concerned about their pride and control than the lives of their citizens.”
