The United States on Friday announced an additional $315 million in aid for starving Sudanese, pressuring warring parties to stop blocking aid and warning that famine of historic proportions could occur without urgent action.
Publication date: 2024/06/15 – 08:06
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The assistance includes food, drinking water, and emergency testing and treatment for malnutrition in children.
An estimated five million people are suffering from extreme hunger inside Sudan, while two million Sudanese are also food insecure in neighbouring countries where they have fled.
“The world needs to wake up to the catastrophe that is unfolding before our eyes,” U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told reporters.
“In the worst-hit areas of Darfur and Kordofan, mortality projections suggest that more than 2.5 million people, or about 15 percent of the population, could die by the end of September,” she said.
“This is the biggest humanitarian crisis on the planet and somehow it threatens to get worse,” she said, noting that the rainy season is expected to make key border crossings impassable.
With a UN humanitarian appeal for Sudan reaching only 16 percent of its target, the world's attention has been focused on Gaza, where aid workers have also warned of the risk of famine.
Samantha Power, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), said the situation in Sudan could be worse than in 2011, when Somalia fell into near-anarchy and three consecutive seasons of no rain led to the deaths of about a quarter of a million people.
“The most worrying scenario is that Sudan faces its worst famine since Ethiopia in the early 1980s, with as many as 1.2 million people dying,” she said.
Sudan was plunged into war in April 2023 after generals heading the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) rejected a unification plan and took up arms to seize control.
As the two sides compete for power across the country, aid deliveries across the Line of Control between the opposing sides are “virtually non-existent,” Power said.
Power strongly criticized both sides. RSF has “systematically looted humanitarian supply warehouses in Sudan's most vulnerable communities, stealing food and livestock and destroying grain storage facilities and wells,” she said.
Meanwhile, the military is “completely breaching its promises and responsibilities” to the Sudanese people by blocking aid from flowing into Darfur across the border with Chad, she said.
“The really clear message here is that the driving force behind historic and deadly levels of hunger in Sudan is not a lack of food, it's sabotage,” she said.
“That needs to change immediately.”
Diplomatic struggle
Repeated U.S.-led efforts to end the conflict have failed, leading many observers to conclude that the warring generals all believe they can win a ground war.
A number of foreign powers support the opposing sides: Sudan has expelled diplomats from the United Arab Emirates for allegedly supplying fuel to the RSF, and Egypt, Turkey and Iran also support the army.
More than 220 people have been killed in recent fighting in El Fasher, the last Darfur town not under RSF control, according to the charity Doctors Without Borders.
The UN Security Council on Thursday called on the RSF to end the siege, with all countries voting in favour except Russia, which abstained.
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Sudanese military commander Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan late last month, urging humanitarian access and the resumption of diplomacy between the two sides.
U.S.-Saudi Arabia-brokered talks in the Saudi port city of Jeddah last year only brought a brief halt to the fighting, and U.S. efforts to resume the talks failed.
“We know there is no acceptable military solution to this conflict,” Thomas-Greenfield said.
“We are disappointed with the delay.”
(AFP)
