Sudan’s burden: Red tape exacerbates humanitarian crisis

Humanitarian and organizational hardships continue to dog the lives of Sudanese civilians in their country, on their way out of it and abroad amid an ongoing conflict.

“The situation is not yet globally [perceived as] a humanitarian crisis,” Rania Abdelaziz, a Sudanese activist, told DW. By chance, she left Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, ahead of the fighting to spend the Muslim holy month of Ramadan with her family in Cairo. Once the fights between the two warring generals, Abdel-Fattah Burhan and Mohammed Dagalo, also known as Hemeti, broke out in mid-April, she decided to stay in Egypt for the time being, and to help arriving Sudanese refugees.

Egyptian consulates and the embassy continue to issue tourist visas to Sudanese who want to cross the border, despite the ongoing clashes that have left around 5,000 injured and killed at least 550, according to the latest Health Ministry figures, which are highly likely to be incomplete. “Sudanese people are not coming into Egypt as tourists; they are displaced and have become refugees,” Abdelaziz said.

The problem with a tourist visa is that it grants access neither to the existing Egyptian aid network nor to international support options for refugees.“There are high bureaucratic and administrative hurdles on both sides [of the Sudanese-Egyptian border] to get the necessary paperwork done to be able to enter Egypt legally, and there are no visa waivers in place at this time from the Egyptian side,” Hager Ali, a researcher at the German think tank GIGA Institute for Global and Area Studies, told DW.

One of the main reasons for the slow processing of the visa applications of regular Sudanese people is the suspension and backlog of paperwork that resulted from the evacuation of diplomatic staff and internationals at the beginning of the clashes, Hager Ali added.

Many Sudanese also report in tweets on social media that there are still no refugee agencies present on the Sudanese side.

The Sudanese Embassy in Egypt does not provide any support, either, says Rania Abdelaziz. “They are not even at Egypt’s border,” she told DW.

Meanwhile, the situation at the Sudanese-Egyptian border crossing at Port Sudan has further deteriorated. Abdalla al-Fatih, a Khartoum resident who fled with his family, told the news agency The Associated Press earlier this week that when they arrived in Port Sudan after a 20-hour journey, they found thousands camping outside the port area. Many had been in the open air for more than a week, with no food or basic services in the sweltering heat.

The UN refugee agency UNHCR announced earlier this week that it will at last launch an inter-agency response plan at the Sudanese-Egyptian border and that it will also redirect some human resources and stockpiles from Chad and South Sudan “as soon as possible.”

Such a humanitarian response plan might become even more urgent in the next days if the latest estimates by the United Nations prove to be correct.

On Tuesday, the UN spokeswoman Olga Sarrado said that if the conflict was not resolved soon, the international body estimates that the number of Sudanese refugees could increase from the current 100,000 to 800,000 people.

Due to the lack of official support for Sudanese refugees in Egypt, the large Sudanese community there — which consists of Sudanese who have fled political unrest in their country in several waves in the 1990s, 2000s and since the ouster of long-term dictator Omar al-Bashir in 2019 — has been stepping in.

This article was provided by Deutsche Welle