Even before Donald Trump’s outrageous cuts to US humanitarian aid programmes, in Sudan and Chad the World Food Programme was trying to cope with a 40 per cent drop in funding. One of the worst humanitarian crises in the world has now been plunged deeper into an unimaginable hell.
Since April 2023, 150,000 people have died in Sudan’s bitter civil war between two heavily armed, pitiless militias funded by regional powers. Twelve million have now been displaced from their homes. Eight million are at risk of starvation. Of the displaced, 760,000 have crossed the border into the Ouddai province in east Chad and turned the small border town of Adre and its unofficial transit camp into Chad’s third largest city, about the size of Cork, with a population estimated at 237,000.
The refugees are mostly Masalit people, an ethnic group who have been murdered and raped by the RSF militia which dominates Sudan’s West Darfur state. Men are not being allowed to cross the border. Many are butchered on sight by the group, which has its origins in the Janjaweed militia, responsible for the worst atrocities of the Darfur crisis of 2003-2008. Eighty per cent of those in the nearby official Aboutengue refugee camp are widows and children.
The grim testimony from the two camps, recorded by Irish Times journalists Patrick Freyne and Chris Maddaloni over the past two weeks, is harrowing: graphic stories of rape and bloody killing, of torture and amputees, of starving emaciated children, of desert camps of straw huts, sweltering heat, parched land.
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“We have lost so many people,” Mariaha Abdelkareem told them, describing her journey into exile. “The people dead in the street,” shot by the RSF. “There were violations for the girls and the women. If you were a man, they were killing you... It’s too difficult to describe this as ‘war’. We lost our community and our sense of being human beings.”
Meanwhile, preoccupied by the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the world is largely silent.
