Sudan’s neglected crisis: People eat dirt or tree leaves

Garang Achien Akok, 41, fled Sudan’s central province with his wife and five children after their home was destroyed by Arab militias. The family headed to the Al Lait IDP camp in northern Darfur last December.

Although they managed to escape the violence of militias allied to the rebel unit RSF, Akok and his loved ones face another major and life-threatening problem. They are starving because Akok has no job and therefore no means to feed everyone.

A Sudanese man described to Reuters journalists how he sometimes goes two or three days without hunger. When such moments arise, Akok is said to watch his wife and children with hopelessness as they dig a hole in the ground with a stick, put their hands in it and scoop up the soil. They make a ball out of it, put it in their mouth and drink it with water. “I keep telling them not to do it, but this is what hunger looks like… I can’t do anything about it,” he describes in despair.

The story of Akoka’s family is not unique in the war-torn country. It will be recalled that the fighting between the Sudanese army and the RSF (Rapid Support Units) militia flared up last April. As a result, a large-scale humanitarian crisis broke out in the country, which, according to the UN, is one of the most serious in the world and at the same time the most neglected.

The country is mired in a crisis on many levels – refugee, economic, health and, among others, also food, which drives many people to the brink of life and death. According to the internationally recognized Integrated Food Security Classification (IPC), almost 18 million people face “high levels of acute food insecurity”. Five million of them are oscillating on the brink of famine, according to the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA).

What is happening in Sudan?

For example, 32-year-old Achek Kuol Ngorová described to Reuters what it means to survive without hunger. She fled from the southern region of Sudan to the Abu Jarra camp in the northern part of Darfur. It describes how the twins died last May – 12 days after birth. When journalists asked her what the cause was, they were told “sickness and hunger”. Ngorová suffered from malnutrition, she was unable to breastfeed and she did not even manage to get artificial food for the newborns.

Lual Deng Majok is also in the same camp. When his family ran out of money late last year, they had to start feeding on tree leaves. He further described how his 17-year-old son struggled with fevers and vomiting in these inhumane conditions. He died two days later.

According to humanitarian organizations, diseases can often become fatal in various forms of malnutrition.

Hunger is spreading in communities across Sudan. In all cases, the human factor is behind it. In some areas, RSF units steal or destroy crops from villagers, loot supplies of humanitarian aid, which is already very limited in the regions, or block its importation. Civilians also often flee their homes before attacks.

On the contrary, the Sudanese army units refuse to send humanitarian aid to some areas, precisely because of the RSF units. Although humanitarian workers operate in the given territories and help is needed because civilians live here.

Sudanese people living in the countryside are not the only ones facing acute food shortages. People from cities, including the metropolis of Khartoum, also have to deal with it. It is there that sharp clashes between the army and the RSF have been taking place since the beginning of the war. Many locals thus found themselves at the center of the fighting, without the possibility to leave their homes and get, for example, food.

Lina Mohammed Hassan described to Reuters journalists how they slowly died in one of the districts of the city of Omdurman, which was besieged by RSF troops.

He says that sometimes the shelling lasted for days. It was very risky to go out and find food, but her extended family of 11 began to run out of food.

The markets were destroyed by the soldiers and it was impossible to get cash. Hassan and her family first lived mainly on rice and lentils. “But even that was hard to get because the price was five times higher than normal,” he says.

In November, RSF troops cut them off from electricity and severed the main water pipe. According to her, the situation got so bad at one point that she and the other adults in the family started skipping some meals so that it could reach the children.

Sometimes they didn’t even eat for two days in a row. The situation then drove them to eat boiled tree leaves in water sprinkled with spices. “We tried to avoid collecting leaves from poisonous trees… We only used mango, lemon and guava leaves. The children ate them. They couldn’t say no because they were very hungry.’

All eventually managed to reach the territory under the administration of the Sudanese army.

Ethnic cleansing in Darfur

Cases of ethnically motivated killings of Masalites in Sudan’s Darfur have been increasing since last year’s uprising by paramilitary RSF units. According to witnesses, the fighters are targeting the boys so that there is no one left to take revenge for the ethnic cleansing.

Sahar Moussa, who managed to escape with her husband and three children from one of the city’s neighborhoods, said they had a comfortable life in Khartoum before the war. Her husband made a good living as a mechanical engineer. She describes that when the children tell her they are hungry, she tells them that their father will bring food. Even though he knows it won’t really happen. “Sometimes I just wish a grenade would kill me so I don’t have to see my children cry from hunger.”

However, many others remain trapped in neighborhoods besieged by RSF units, Reuters writes.

The humanitarian crisis in Sudan has not yet been reversed. The priority of both the army and the RSF is to win the war.

Humanitarian aid, which, according to UNOCHA data, corresponds to only a fraction of what is needed, thus continues to not reach those in need. The problematic factors are general insecurity in the country, problems with looting, bureaucratic obstacles, problems with network and telephone connections, lack of cash and a limited number of technical and humanitarian workers on the ground, according to the UN agency.

The situation in many parts of the country is completely unknown because humanitarian workers do not have access to them, Médecins Sans Frontières said for Seznam Zpravy.

Neither the Sudanese army nor the RSF have responded to Reuters’ inquiries.