Sudan’s Refugee Crisis

Welcome to Foreign Policy’s Africa Brief.

The highlights this week: Senegal’s top court strikes down Macky Sall’s election delay, Kenya’s president wants Raila Odinga to get the top AU post, and Gabon sells off Ali Bongo’s Parisian property.

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Almost 11 months into a war between the country’s military and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) paramilitary group, aid agencies warn that Sudan is facing the world’s fastest-unfolding refugee crisis.

The fighting that began on Apr. 15, 2023, has no end in sight; yet, Sudan’s needs are competing for attention with conflicts in the Gaza Strip and Ukraine. With warnings of famine on the rise, about 25 million Sudanese—half the population—are in dire need of humanitarian assistance, and current funding is woefully insufficient to help them, according to the United Nations.

“Sudan keeps getting forgotten by the international community,” U.N. aid chief Martin Griffiths told diplomats earlier this month at the United Nations in Geneva. “There is a certain kind of obscenity about the humanitarian world, which is the competition of suffering, a competition between places: ‘I have more suffering than you, so I need to get more attention, so I need to get more money.’” An appeal made by the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs last year to provide aid to civilians in Sudan was less than half funded.

Nearly 8 million people have fled their homes in Sudan since April, including about 700,000 who have arrived in neighboring Chad and half a million in Egypt. Official refugee camps struggle to keep up with the pace of new arrivals, Jérôme Tubiana reported recently from Chad in Foreign Policy.

Sudanese refugees outnumber locals by more than 2 to 1 in Adre, a Chadian border town about 25 kilometers (nearly 16 miles) from the capital city of Sudan’s state of West Darfur. Adre now hosts 150,000 refugees—compared with a local population of 68,000 people—and barely has enough food and clean water available for them. Aid organizations say more shelters, medicine, and basic supplies are desperately needed.

“People are living out of tents they’ve constructed out of clothes, plastic tarps, and pieces of wood,” Alison Bottomley, a specialist with the Norwegian Refugee Council’s emergency response team, told Foreign Policy.

Aid agencies have continuously raised the alarm, but it has not resulted in more funding, Bottomley said. “There is very little global attention … and the longer people are staying in camps without sufficient water, every problem is getting worse,” she added.

Most refugees who have arrived in Chad fled targeted violence by the RSF against the non-Arab Masalit population. The threats include sexual violence; there have been numerous accounts of women and girls being raped, sold in markets, and forced into prostitution by the RSF and various local Arab militias.

In many ways, the atrocities are a repeat of the civil war that began in Darfur in 2003. About 400,000 people fled Darfur to eastern Chad after that conflict erupted more than two decades ago and many have never left, bringing the total Sudanese refugee population in Chad close to a million. Chad is also hosting refugees from Cameroon, Nigeria, and the Central African Republic amid its own political crisis over the legitimacy of military rule under junta leader Mahamat Idriss Déby.

The impact on neighboring countries is not sustainable, Bottomley warned. The influx of refugees into Egypt coincides with the country’s worst economic crisis in decades, and it has struggled to cope. An escalation of the Israel-Hamas war in Rafah could also increase Egypt’s refugee burden by forcing displaced Palestinians into its territory.

Agence France-Presse reports that the grim conditions for refugees in Egypt—who are cramped into overcrowded apartments without jobs and money for food—have led some of the 4 million Sudanese refugees who have fled there to return home.

“There is a real urgency around more serious international diplomacy to bring the conflict to an end,” Michael Hanna, the U.S. program director at the International Crisis Group, told FP. “What Egypt really fears is a kind of Libya scenario—a real fragmentation of the state.”

The RSF has made significant gains in the conflict, seizing towns and cities in Sudan’s breadbasket state of Jazira and the state’s capital, Wad Madani. “The war doesn’t look like it will have a clean victor anytime soon,” Hanna said. “In the meantime, the worst-case scenario is that the longer it goes on, the more the war regionalizes and more outside actors become engaged,” he added.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia back the Sudanese army, and reports have emerged that the United Arab Emirates has supplied arms to the RSF. Iran has also supplied Sudan’s army with combat drones, according to a Bloomberg report.

French Foreign Minister Stéphane Séjourné said last week that Paris intends to host a humanitarian conference for Sudan on April 15. Last month, senior leaders from the Sudanese army and the RSF met three times in Bahrain’s capital, Manama. Sudanese army Gen. Shamseldin Kabbashi and Abdelrahim Hamdan Dagalo—the brother of RSF commander Mohamed Hamdan “Hemeti” Dagalo—took part in those discussions.

Yet, the warring generals have yet to meet face to face since the war began and do not appear ready to end their fight.

Friday, Feb. 16, to Thursday, Feb. 29: Jennifer R. Littlejohn, the acting U.S. assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs, travels to Oman, Ghana, and Kenya to discuss marine conservation and commercial space activities.

Wednesday, Feb. 21: South African Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana presents the country’s 2024 budget.

Wednesday, Feb. 21, to Friday, Feb. 23: The second edition of Africa’s Green Economy Summit will be held in Cape Town, South Africa.

Monday, Feb. 26, to Tuesday, Feb. 27: Nigeria’s central bank holds a policy meeting.

AU finance club. On the sidelines of its summit over the weekend, the African Union (AU) launched the Africa Club, an alliance of African-owned financial institutions, to address challenges being faced by African nations in attracting investments for economic development. In a statement, the AU announced that the group will include the African Export Import Bank, African Trade and Investment Development Insurance, and other institutions that together hold more than $53 billion in financing and investment.

AU officials are preparing to form a more uniform and coherent infrastructure between member states ahead of the G-20 summit next year, following its admission as a permanent member of the group.

Odinga’s AU bid. Since losing a Supreme Court case to overturn the 2022 election outcome, defeated Kenyan presidential candidate Raila Odinga has been a thorn in President William Ruto’s side. It is no surprise, then, that members of Ruto’s camp are reportedly backing Odinga’s bid to become African Union Commission chairman next year. Odinga also announced that he had sought the endorsement of former Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo for his candidacy. Odinga is clearly eager to get the job, but Ruto seems even more eager for his old rival to get a plush posting in Addis Ababa. The four-year rotating job would mean Odinga could not run in Kenya’s 2027 presidential election, which would have been his sixth attempt.

Indeed, Ruto’s government has been extremely vocal about Odinga’s bid. “If Raila has expressed interest, we would rather have him there because when he is there the interests of Kenya are taken care of,” said Kenyan government spokesperson Isaac Mwaura.

“Orchestrating Odinga’s exit through a busy AU job would be a major political coup for Ruto,” reports the East African. Last year, Ruto accused Odinga of fueling anti-government protests against the rising cost of living. In the past few months Odinga has vehemently opposed Ruto’s tax hikes and foreign policies, including a deal designed to boost foreign exchange reserves that sent Kenyan workers to Israel.

Senegal elections. Senegal’s presidential election could be held as early as March after the country’s Constitutional Council ruled on Thursday to overturn President Macky Sall’s controversial decision to postpone the vote. The country’s election authority ordered Sall to quickly organize elections and step down by April 2, when his mandate ends. The first authorized demonstrations took place over the weekend in Dakar to call for a speedy election.

Observers have suggested that Sall was playing for time when he postponed the original election, since his political allies in the Benno Bokk Yakaar coalition believed that Sall’s handpicked successor, Amadou Ba, was unlikely to win. The move backfired spectacularly, and the president now has no choice but to comply with the council’s directive.

In a statement, Sall said he would “carry out the consultations necessary to organize the presidential election as soon as possible.” Scores of jailed opposition members have been released from prison to appease public anger. But opposition leader Ousmane Sonko and his chosen presidential candidate, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, remain in prison.

A new presidential candidate list published Tuesday by Senegal’s Constitutional Council did not include the previously disqualified Sonko and Karim Wade, the son of Sall’s predecessor Abdoulaye Wade. The amended list removed just one candidate: opposition contender Rose Wardini.

Ethiopia massacre. The Ethiopian government on Thursday dismissed a report that its soldiers massacred at least 45 civilians last month in the Amhara region for allegedly supporting Fano, an Amhara militia that is fighting against the government.

According to the state-linked Ethiopian Human Rights Commission, the killings occurred in the town of Merawi, following months of clashes between the military and Fano. Authorities have cut the internet in Amhara, and journalists are unable to access the region. Security analysts have urged Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed to pursue a national dialogue with elites in Amhara, Tigray, and Oromia who feel shortchanged by the 2022 peace deal struck in Pretoria over its failure to address contested lands. Insurgents cannot be beaten back through a military strategy alone because they are backed by local elites, argues the International Crisis Group.

Gabon’s putschists are set to sell deposed President Ali Bongo’s 18th-century Parisian mansion with a price tag of 200 million euros (about $215 million). It was once fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld’s party mansion, which Bongo bought in 2010 for 100 million euros and then spent the same amount renovating it.

Gabon’s military leader, Gen. Brice Oligui Nguema, led a coup last August that ostensibly ended 55 years of the Bongo dynasty’s rule. Bongo, who was initially put under house arrest, was released last September in what analysts say was a palace coup orchestrated by the president’s inner circle.

Bongo family members bought several luxury Paris properties, allegedly through embezzled Gabonese public funds, which Oligui has vowed to sell and end elite state capture. Bongo’s eldest son, Noureddin, and wife, Sylvia, have been charged with money-laundering and embezzling public funds. The junta accuses Sylvia of manipulating the 65-year-old former president to misuse state assets following his stroke in 2018.

Moroccan anti-privatization protests. In African Arguments, Ilhem Rachidi reports on an ongoing three-month protest against water privatization in the town of Figuig in eastern Morocco. The town is also a flash point for tensions between Morocco and neighboring Algeria, which borders Figuig on three sides.

Queer literature’s African popularity. In the New York Times, Abdi Latif Dahir reports that more Africans are openly discussing their sexual experiences, leading to a boom in queer literature across Africa—including in Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa.

Arinze Ifeakandu, from Nigeria’s northern Kano state, is part of this rise in writers despite homosexuality being a crime in Nigeria. Ifeakandu’s short story collection examining themes of queer love, God’s Children Are Little Broken Things, won last year’s Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers and the 2022 Republic of Consciousness Prize.