United Nations agencies warn Sudan is at a breaking point after more than 15 months of conflict because of what they call a crisis of neglect.
“Sudan’s humanitarian crisis for children is, by numbers, the biggest in the world. It is also a crisis of neglect,” James Elder, UNICEF spokesman said, adding, “This is not a forgotten crisis. This is known and this is, in many aspects, ignored.”
The United Nations children’s agency reports the extent of the horrors and atrocities inflicted upon children in Sudan is going unnoticed because it is not being reported. At the same time, it says the crimes committed against children are overlooked because aid organizations have very limited access to the country’s hotspots.
Despite this, the agency says the news is trickling out, and it is not good.
Speaking from the capital Khartoum, UNICEF spokesman Elder told journalists Tuesday in Geneva that he has met people who have witnessed the suffering and violence to which children are being subjected, who have seen children killed and wounded while playing football and doing the things that children do.
“Yesterday, in Khartoum, I spoke to a senior medical worker who gave an insight into the magnitude of sexual violence during this war. She explained she had direct contact with hundreds, hundreds of women and girls, some as young as 8 years old, who have been raped. Many have been held captive for weeks on end.
“Thousands of children have been killed or injured in Sudan’s war. Sexual violence and military recruitment are increasing,” he said.
The United Nations calls Sudan the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. Since the country’s rival generals plunged the country into war in mid-April 2023, the United Nations reports more than 18,800 people have been killed and upwards of 33,000 injured.
The International Organization for Migration reports more than 10.7 million people, nearly half of them children, are displaced inside Sudan and more than 2 million people have fled as refugees into neighboring countries.
“The people of Sudan are facing one crisis after another, with no end in sight. Every day, and it seems like almost every hour, the situation in Sudan worsens,” said Mohamed Refaat, IOM Sudan chief of mission.
Speaking from his base in Port Sudan, he warned that heavy rains and flooding are creating new hardships for thousands of people already suffering from the ongoing conflict.
“Families are being uprooted, entire communities shattered. The floodwaters have turned homes into ruins, and the violence has turned neighborhoods into graveyards,” he said, adding that “hunger has reached catastrophic levels” on a scale not seen since the Darfur crisis in the early 2000s.
“Almost all people displaced across Sudan — 97 percent — are in areas with acute food insecurity or worse,” he said. “Over the next three months, an estimated 25.6 million people will face severe food insecurity as the conflict spreads and coping mechanisms are exhausted. One out of two are struggling to put food on the table every single day.”
In late June, the IPC’s Integrated Food Security Phase Classification Famine Review Committee reported that 13 areas in Sudan are on the brink of famine. On August 1, the committee declared famine in Zamzam Camp in North Darfur, which houses about half a million internally displaced people.
UNICEF estimates 730,000 children are projected to suffer severe acute malnutrition this year, the most life-threatening form of malnutrition.
“Without action, tens of thousands of Sudanese children may die over the coming months,” UNICEF’s Elder warns. “And that is by no means a worst-case scenario. Any disease outbreak will see mortality skyrocket. Disease is our great fear.”
Under current living conditions, and with heavy rains and flooding, he said outbreaks of measles, diarrhea, respiratory infections and other diseases would spread like wildfire.
Aid agencies report they are seriously underfunded and do not have the money to scale up life-saving humanitarian operations to head off tens of thousands of preventable civilian deaths in the coming months.
Elder contends there is a pragmatic as well as moral reason for the international community to support efforts to stave off this impending multi-pronged tragedy.
He notes it is much cheaper to fund a crisis before it reaches “those utterly catastrophic levels of food insecurity for children.”
“We know when there are famine declarations that the money pours in. We also know it is too late. Children are dying. If that famine does spread into some of those 13 areas at risk of famine, the money will flow,” he said, however, “the children will also be dead.”
