The international community has pledged nearly $1.4 billion (about €1.375 billion) to help Sudan, which is plunging into destruction and violence at an “unprecedented” rate.
“This crisis requires continued financial support and I hope we can all keep Sudan at the top of our agenda”said United Nations (UN) humanitarian aid chief Martin Griffiths at the end of a donor conference in Geneva.
The conference took place during a three-day ceasefire in Sudan, which appears to have restored calm in the capital Khartoum.
Despite this ceasefire, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said Sudan was spiraling into a spiral of death and destruction at an “unprecedented” rate.
“Sudan could quickly become a place of anarchy, creating insecurity across the region”if the international community turns its back on him, he warned.
While Griffiths underlined donor generosity, this amount represents only half of the total humanitarian organizations estimate they will need this year to help a population already grappling with a severe crisis exacerbated by violent fighting between the army and the Rapid Support Forces. (RFS) paramilitaries.
Of the three billion dollars (about €2.750 billion) the UN needs, only 17% has been funded so far, while 25 million Sudanese – more than half the population – depend on humanitarian aid to survive.
Germany, co-hosting the conference with the European Union, Qatar, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, has pledged to contribute €200 million by 2024, half of which is new funding yet to be allocated, and Qatar has pledged $50 million (45.8 million euros).
The European Union has pledged EUR 190 million in humanitarian aid and development aid.
UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi insisted that the payment had to be made quickly.
2000 dead in two months of conflict
According to the non-governmental organization Acled, which specializes in gathering information in conflict zones, more than 2,000 people have died in two months of conflict and more than 2.5 million people have been forced to flee to other parts of Sudan or to other countries. . .
On the ground, airstrikes and artillery bombardments halted Sunday morning in Khartoum, where five million people survive in sweltering heat.
On the second day of the 72-hour ceasefire, which ends at 6 a.m. local time on Wednesday (one hour less in Lisbon), no fighting could be heard in the city, according to several residents interviewed by the France-Presse agency.
The fighting began more than two months ago, on April 15, between the army led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the RSF led by General Mohamed Hamdane Daglo.
After about a dozen ceasefires were systematically violated, the belligerents agreed to allow humanitarian aid to enter this East African country, one of the poorest in the world.
But everything is scarce. The arrival of the rainy season is heightening fears of epidemics, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said Monday, describing the accumulation of rubbish and corpses still lying in the open in hard-to-reach areas.
The organization emphasizes that many residents have been forced to drink unsafe water from the Nile or other sources out of desperation.
The Red Cross, UN agencies and other non-governmental organizations should also help Sudan’s neighboring countries, which have themselves fallen into an economic crisis or have been affected by violence, to receive refugees.
Saudi Arabia and the United States have been acting as mediators between the two sides for several weeks. They managed to negotiate small truces, but failed to open negotiations on a plan to end the crisis.
At Monday’s conference, Qatar Prime Minister Mohammed ben Abdelrahmane al-Thani welcomed this mediation effort, as well as those of the African Union and IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority for Development, the East African bloc to which Sudan belongs).
“There is no solution other than a political solution,” he insisted.
The situation is particularly worrying in Darfur, a vast region in Western Sudan where soldiers, paramilitaries, tribal fighters and armed civilians are fighting each other.
Devastated as far back as the 2000s by a war that the United Nations says has left some 300,000 dead and nearly 2.5 million displaced, Darfur is heading for another “humanitarian catastrophe,” the UN warned, referring to possible “crimes against humanity”. “.
In Darfur, “the conflict now has an ethnic dimension,” the UN, African Union and IGAD warned in a joint statement, “with targeted attacks based on people’s identities and displacement of populations.”
More than 150,000 people have fled Darfur for Chad, according to the UN.
Source: DN
