A country torn apart by civil war could soon face one of the world’s worst famines in decades, experts say
Refugees who fled territory in Darfur controlled by the Rapid Support Forces take shelter from the rain under a donkey cart and plastic sheeting at a refugee camp in Adre, Chad. Photograph: Ivor Prickett/New York Timesfrom bringing enormous amounts of food into the country through a vital border crossing, effectively cutting off aid to hundreds of thousands of starving people during the depths of a civil war.
A mother of three, Bahja Muhakar slumped with exhaustion under a tree after her family migrated into Chad at the Adré crossing. It had been a frightening six-day journey, from the besieged city of El Fasher, along roads where fighters threatened to kill them, she said. But the family felt they had little choice.
The military doesn’t even control the crossing at Adré, where RSF fighters stand 90m behind the border on the Sudanese side. As the prospect of mass starvation in Sudan draws closer, the Adré closure has become a central focus of efforts by the United States, by far the largest donor, to ramp up the emergency aid effort. “This obstruction is completely unacceptable,” Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the US ambassador to the UN, recently told reporters.
And the international response to Sudan’s plight has largely been paltry, slow and lacking in urgency. As rain pelted down, Aisha Idriss huddled under a plastic sheet, gripping it tight against gusts of wind as she nursed her four-month-old daughter. Her three other children squatted beside them.Just three beds were empty in a malnutrition centre run by Médecins Sans Frontières, filled with starving infants. The youngest was 33 days old, a girl whose mother had died in childbirth.
In a survey released last week, Mercy Corps said a quarter of the children in central Darfur state were so malnourished that they could soon die. In an interview, Sudan’s ambassador to the UN, Al-Harith Idriss Mohamed, defended the Adré closure, citing evidence collected by Sudanese intelligence of arms smuggling. He said the UN was “happy” with the arrangement of routing trucks north through the border at Tine.
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