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00:00It began a little over a year ago as an argument between two top generals.
00:05It's now become a full-blown civil war with humanitarian aid groups and the United Nations
00:13warning that Sudan faces its worst famine possibly in decades.
00:18The way things are going, more than nine million people are at risk.
00:26This is an exclusive report at the border with South Sudan from France 24 correspondent
00:32Olivia Bizeau.
00:36Every day, about a thousand people cross this border into South Sudan.
00:42They're fleeing the war that broke out in April 2023 in neighbouring Sudan between the
00:46army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, with the few belongings they have left.
00:53This family travelled for five days from Khartoum.
00:56They face checkpoints and threats from both warring sides.
01:01The RSF is threatening everyone in Khartoum.
01:05And if you leave your house, they'll take everything you own.
01:09Even if you just go out to get some bread, they'll beat you.
01:14Everyone living there is a prisoner in their home.
01:17You cannot imagine the horrors of what is taking place and the crimes they are committing.
01:23Nothing is left.
01:24Asha, her two children and four grandchildren just got here.
01:29They're already being sent to the nearby transit centre in Renk.
01:34They're among nine million people to have been forced to flee the conflict, making it
01:38the world's largest displacement crisis.
01:42It's my first time here.
01:43We're expecting difficulties but nothing too serious.
01:45It's been good so far and it's such a relief to not hear the sound of explosions and war.
01:50Asha and her family finally arrive, exhausted.
01:53Hello, how are you?
01:56If you have any problems registering or with anything, I'm here to help.
02:01I am now feeling safe.
02:04I am sharing with you.
02:06Before I wasn't able to talk.
02:09But when I remember everything that happened, I feel sad.
02:16The scars can still be found in my mind and soul.
02:23This settlement was built to host 2,000 people.
02:26But it's now bursting with more than 25,000 refugees, who are facing shortages of water,
02:33food and shelter.
02:35Now that we've arrived and I'm seeing all these people, I'm starting to get nervous.
02:40I thought the main challenge would be leaving Sudan and once we were out, it would be easier
02:45to go abroad to another country with my children.
02:47But all of these people are hoping for that too.
02:50My expectations are quickly going down.
02:54In an attempt to ease the pressure on this transit centre, people are being transported
02:59to more permanent camps.
03:02It's 5.30 the next morning.
03:06Yassine is about to set off.
03:09He came here alone.
03:10His wife and his four children are still in Sudan.
03:14I want to go to Maban and see what the situation is there and whether it is suitable for my
03:19family to come there and stay with me there.
03:21I think it is better than here because this camp is well-accommodated and everything is
03:28good than here.
03:31While women, children and the elderly travel by bus, the men are forced into this truck
03:37for the 12-hour drive along dirt tracks.
03:44The sun has already set by the time they finally arrive at their final destination, Maban.
03:54It was a difficult night for Yassine and the other refugees.
04:00All of these people escaped war and all of them need help.
04:04I hope that life will become easier for us.
04:07The important thing is for my family to be safe.
04:12They have already killed most members of my family in Darfur.
04:16Armed men killed them, raped them.
04:20Trauma isn't the only challenge.
04:22There's a huge shortage of basic goods here and most people haven't had access to health
04:27facilities since before the war.
04:30Because of a lack of international funding, aid workers are struggling to cope.
04:35The children that I brought from Sudan, they came together with severity of malnutrition
04:41since the time they arrived.
04:42Seventy or eighty percent, they are seeking medical assistance in the facility.
04:48We meet Yassine again.
04:50He's being given a tour of where he will live by Majid, who arrived here a year ago.
05:00Yassine feels defeated.
05:02I will try to find a safe place for all aspects, security, education, good life, and then I
05:15will bring them.
05:16But now I cannot bring my family here.
05:19Now I see it's not as I expected, it's bad or worse.
05:26It's an impossible choice, living in camps full of hardship or living in a war zone.
05:33But it's a decision that Sudanese people will keep having to make, as it's unlikely the
05:38conflict in Sudan will end any time soon.
05:43With us to talk about it is Ruvendrini Mendikdiwella, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees,
05:49Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, usually based in New York.
05:53Thank you for being with us here in our Paris studios.
05:55Thank you for inviting me.
05:57First your reaction to that report, and of course the irony that a few years ago South
06:02Sudan had a civil war and people were fleeing north.
06:06Now it's in the other direction.
06:08Absolutely.
06:09And it really is a dramatic situation right now because the UN High Commissioner for Refugees,
06:13my boss, is actually in Sudan and South Sudan this week to bring attention to this situation
06:19right now.
06:20And we have some seven million, over seven million Sudanese who are internally displaced,
06:24so within Sudan itself, but a little over two million refugees, Sudanese refugees in
06:28neighbouring countries, and you saw in South Sudan, but also in Chad where there have been
06:33I think some 600,000 Sudanese who crossed into Chad since the beginning of the conflicts
06:38last year.
06:39And this is in addition to a group of Sudanese refugees in Chad who had already been there
06:43for about 20 years now from a previous influx.
06:46So you can imagine that these countries are really facing a dramatic situation because
06:50these are also countries that have fairly significant domestic challenges, both socioeconomic
06:54and political.
06:55We can add the Central African Republic to that list.
06:59Absolutely.
07:00And these are all countries that have, despite their internal challenges, maintained a very
07:03generous open borders policy in accepting all these Sudanese refugees, but with very
07:08little international assistance or attention paid to this problem.
07:11We're looking at a map here where the focus has been the last few weeks, particularly
07:15with Hamedi's rapid support forces besieging at times al-Fasher, raiding a hospital run
07:23by MSF recently.
07:25And yeah, it's the question, like you were saying, there's this distinction made, but
07:28is it a distinction between those who are refugees and those who are internally displaced?
07:34It's artificial at best.
07:35I mean, there is a legal, international legal framework which regulates the situation of
07:39refugees.
07:40So once you crossed your, left your country of origin and gone into another country, there's
07:43a whole international treaty that comes into play, whereas if you're displaced within your
07:47own country for precisely the same reasons, there's actually no international protection
07:51regime that covers you because you're still a national in your own country.
07:55When you look at Sudan and that report by Olivia Bizot, she speaks to that engineer
08:00Yassine and that, that predicament, do you live as a refugee in a camp that's perhaps
08:05unsafe or do you live in a war zone?
08:08What would you, what would you say if you had Yassine in front of you right now?
08:11I mean, it's very hard to advise these people because it's absolutely true.
08:14He's come for and seen for himself how really bad the situation is for refugees in South
08:19Sudan, not because the South Sudanese don't want to assist them, but simply because, as
08:23I said, of a lack of international assistance, you know, Paris, I mean, the government of
08:28France convened this conference on Sudan a couple of months ago, and a lot of donors
08:32came and pledged something like $2.2 billion in aid.
08:36But up to now, the refugee response appeal has been funded at 9% and the humanitarian
08:43response appeal.
08:44So that covers also not just the countries of asylum, but also the internally displaced
08:47within Sudan.
08:49That appeal has been funded at 19%.
08:51So you can see they're egregiously underfunded operations.
08:54Why?
08:55Well, lack of interest, lack of prioritization, you know.
08:58Why isn't this more of a priority?
08:59Well, you know, Gaza is taking up a lot of attention.
09:02Ukraine is taking up a lot of attention.
09:04People tend to focus on what's happening in their own backyards.
09:07They don't necessarily focus on what they see as a conflict that's, you know, taking
09:10place a long way from home.
09:12And unfortunately, these are also regions where conflicts tend to occur fairly frequently,
09:16as we were just talking about, you know, previous influx of Sudanese refugees 20 years ago who
09:21are still in Chad right now.
09:23So unfortunately, there's, you know, compassion fatigue, the fact that there's a slight disconnect
09:26between the donors and these regions far away where all these really tragedies are happening
09:32on a daily basis.
09:33The divided United Nations Security Council, surely this is not something that would impact
09:39Sudan directly, or are there these superpower rivalries surrounding?
09:44I think, you know, I mean, we are a humanitarian agency, UNHCR, so we don't really like to
09:47comment on political issues.
09:50But of course, you know, the five permanent members tend to take different sides on many
09:54of these major crises around the world.
09:57And I was serving myself in New York, as you mentioned, and I've never seen a council this
10:01divided and so polarized.
10:04And that's unfortunately having an impact not just on the political situation, but on
10:07us humanitarian actors as well, because we are unable to operate properly because of
10:11a lack of humanitarian access, as you saw, in Sudan itself, a lack of humanitarian funding,
10:17and simply a lack of interest in obtaining any kind of political solution to these conflicts.
10:23We're ahead in the summer months now in Sudan.
10:27What are your staff telling you on the ground when it comes to, like, how big is this risk
10:32of a major famine?
10:34That it's, you know, we have the World Food Program that's operating inside Sudan, along
10:38with UNHCR and other humanitarian agencies as well.
10:41And they have been alerting us to this for a long time now.
10:43But they're saying come the next few months, there really is a very, very real danger of
10:47famine occurring, and that two thirds of the population would be subject to this.
10:52And, you know, this is really an urgent appeal that we and they and the Secretary General
10:56himself of the United Nations has been really making.
11:00Let me ask you just a broader question.
11:03Ruvendrini, Mehdi Diwele, you're in Paris for this World Refugee Day.
11:08What did you say?
11:09You've been attending events at City Hall.
11:14With we've seen the global warming, the conflicts that we've mentioned, this issue of what it
11:20is to be a refugee, is it different from when you began this line of work?
11:25Well, I began some 30 plus years ago, so I'm really old in this system, and in age as well.
11:30And yes, the world is a different place.
11:32When I started off with UNHCR, a conflict, I mean, a refugee situation never lasted more
11:37than five years at most.
11:38But now we have refugee situations that are lasting 40 years or longer.
11:41I mean, the first Afghan refugees crossed into Pakistan in 1979.
11:46Forty-five years later, they're still there.
11:48The people who are in that report, in that camp, what's their fate?
11:52Are they going to stay in these camps for a long, long time?
11:55Strong likelihood is yes.
11:56They will probably remain in these settlements, we hope, in better conditions for a long,
12:01long time.
12:02Eventually, we hope there will be a solution and that most of them will be able to return
12:06voluntarily back to Sudan in conditions of safety and dignity.
12:10But that solution is a long way off yet, unfortunately.
12:13How many of those people can South Sudan kind of integrate, bring into their fold?
12:19The problem is that there were a significant number of South Sudanese refugees in Sudan.
12:23You mentioned that as well, that early on the movement was in the opposite direction.
12:28So these South Sudanese refugees who were in Sudan for a significant period of time
12:32have now returned to South Sudan, not because conditions are auspicious for their return,
12:37but simply because of the fact that there is a conflict in Sudan and they can no longer
12:40stay there.
12:41So in addition to the Sudanese refugees, there are also a significant number of South Sudanese
12:45returnees who are coming back to their country of origin.
12:48So the government of South Sudan is grappling on two fronts, absorbing their own compatriots
12:52who are coming back after an extended period of asylum, but also trying to absorb this
12:57new influx of refugees from Sudan as well.
13:00We have a world where everything moves faster than before.
13:05And when you have a crisis like this one, we get the pictures faster.
13:10And we also get the backlash faster.
13:12We've seen a rise here in Europe of an anti-immigrant sentiment, same as in the United States.
13:21As we have at the same time, growing global population, global warming, is it becoming
13:27mission impossible to deal, to have a sort of holistic view of these movements of populations
13:34in a crisis, which is what you do?
13:36No, you know, it's interesting because yes, during electoral periods, you know, refugees
13:41and asylum seekers and migrants tend to become demonized, instrumentalized, weaponized, you
13:45know, part of the campaign.
13:47All gloves off.
13:48They tend to become really the scapegoats for everything that's going wrong in society.
13:53But you know, every year around this period, we conduct this survey with Ipsos.
13:58And this year we did that with 52 countries, most of them major refugee hosting countries,
14:03where we asked them the simple question from, you know, people on the streets.
14:08If a person was fleeing persecution, conflict or violence, would they have the right to
14:12seek asylum in your territory?
14:13And 73% of the people surveyed said yes.
14:16So it's true in the media, social media, traditional media, you do see a lot of negative rhetoric
14:22around refugees and migrants.
14:24But then you have a silent majority that actually do say, yes, we would accept these people
14:29if they're fleeing persecution and conflict.
14:30So we take courage and heart from that, the fact that there is, you know, a number of
14:35people still supporting us in our mission to provide protection and assistance to these
14:39people.
14:40Ruvendrini Menik-Diwella, many thanks for being with us here on France 24.
14:44Thank you for inviting me.