GENEVA: Advances by paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in Sudan could trigger another exodus across the country’s borders, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, has said.
The RSF took over Darfur’s city of El-Fashir in late October in one of its biggest gains of the 2-1/2-year war with Sudan’s army. This month, advances have continued eastward into the Kordofan region and they seized the country’s biggest oil field.
Most of the estimated 40,000 people that the UN says have been displaced by the latest violence in Kordofan — a region comprising of three states in central and southern Sudan — have sought refuge within the country, Grandi said, but that could change if violence spreads to a large city like El-Obeid.
BACKGROUND
The war has uprooted nearly 12 million people, including 4.3 million who have fled to Chad, South Sudan and elsewhere.
“If that were to be — not necessarily taken — but engulfed by the war, I am pretty sure we would see more exodus,” said Grandi from Port Sudan.
“We have to remain very alert in neighboring countries in case this happens,” he said.
Humanitarian workers lack resources to help those fleeing, many of whom have been raped, robbed or bereaved by the violence, said Grandi, who met with survivors who fled mass killings in El-Fashir.
“We are barely responding,” said Grandi, referring to a Sudan response plan, which is just a third funded largely due to Western donor cuts. UNHCR lacks resources to relocate Sudanese refugees from an unstable area along Chad’s border, he said.
Most of those who trekked hundreds of kilometers from El-Fashir and Kordofan to Sudan’s Al-Dabba camp on the banks of the Nile north of Khartoum — which Grandi visited last week — are women and children. Their husbands and sons were killed or conscripted along the way.
Some mothers said they disguised their sons as girls to protect them from being abducted by fighters, Grandi said.
“Even fleeing is difficult because people are continuously stopped by the militias,” he said.
