Sudan crisis highlights why world’s refugee system needs a reset
The latest violent chapter of Sudan’s decades-long strife is nearing its first anniversary, following the outbreak of conflict in April last year. With 25 million people in need out of 49 million across the vast nation, this is our biggest humanitarian crisis. Integral to that is the world’s fastest and biggest forced displacement at about 8 million.
With no abatement in the violence or any credible peace prospects, these records will tumble as we advance through 2024. The number of needy is projected to reach 30 million, while those displaced will top 10 million.
As the state fragments, destruction and insecurity are becoming widespread. Hospitals, schools, water supplies, banking and communications have become distant memories, while citizens are terrorized and abused in their homes and neighborhoods. Hunger and disease stalk the land. Aid access is a matter of luck, even as courageous local groups take extraordinary risks to bring some succor.
It is understandable that humanitarian concern centers on mass suffering inside the country. However, population outflows from Sudan also deserve to be spotlighted because they represent the most awful manifestations of the agony engulfing the nation.
No one flees their country, abandoning all they hold dear, for precarious wanderings in foreign lands unless they are beyond desperate. Sudanese refugees attest to the unmitigated horrors they have endured. Not only violence but also depraved cruelties including sexual violence, torture, disappearances, executions and massacres. These occur nationwide. But when ethnically targeted in Darfur on a grand scale, they echo the genocide of 20 years ago, whose account has never been settled.
That is not all. Those with the strength and means to run away endure incredible obstacles along the way to the border. They are routinely robbed and otherwise exploited. Crossing the border brings further nightmares. Borders open and close almost on a whim and a refugee’s most vulnerable moment is when waiting for an indeterminate period to cross, perhaps with no documents.
What little dignity a Sudanese refugee may have miraculously retained is dumped at the border as a new struggle commences. Ahead lies the uncertain mercy of strangers. Refugees may be initially welcomed by host communities with a shared history, identity and culture, who have always come and gone across Sudan’s long borders. But traditional migration, influenced by seasonal factors, has been toxified by spreading conflict. Regional solidarity networks have fractured, as today’s refugee flows are seen as a security nuisance. Global experience is that the well of compassion eventually runs dry and all refugees outlast their welcome, sooner or later. Who can blame Sudan’s neighbors, which are themselves among the most impoverished and unstable states on the planet? Especially as their reluctant guests keep on coming.
When destitute survivors do find refuge, there is little accompanying help. Underfunded and sparsely staffed aid agencies struggle to provide basic shelter, food, water, sanitation, healthcare and protection, let alone mental support for the unbearably traumatized.
With the physical and material conditions of Sudanese refugees mirroring what they fled from, was it worth leaving?
Some think not after making their own grim calculations. Hundreds are returning to Sudan from Egypt having exhausted life-sustaining possibilities there. Others decide to keep moving and perish along dangerous trails northward through the Sahel and Mediterranean and southward toward South Africa. Their appalling misadventures include being preyed upon by people smugglers, traffickers, enslavers and sexual exploiters.
There is a myth around refugees returning home. Only a minority of refugees ever go back, even if they hold close the culture and customs of their origins. When refugee exile extends into decades, as is common now, the context of home shifts permanently. Meanwhile, the latest UN appeal for Sudan seeks a record $4.1 billion, of which $1.4 billion is for refugees and host communities. On past experience, less than half will be funded. Much suffering will remain unmitigated, even as it increases.
The Sudan refugee problems reflect the growing malaise of an overburdened global humanitarian system. As well as a broken migration framework that has lost focus by lumping together everyone moving for any reason, including those escaping poverty or climate change or just seeking a better life. That is 300 million people. Of course, all have equal entitlements, but among them are just 30 million refugees who lost what little rights they ever had thanks to vicious conflict and persecution.
All migrants must be treated with humanity, but treating them equally means that those who are in desperate need of international protection and asylum must take their chances among the hordes of others who retain more agency. Another 110 million are forcibly displaced internally and deserve assistance, but combining them with refugees produces more muddle. Why are refugee outflows often dismissed as just one of the many manifestations of a complex crisis and implicitly deprioritized? Why does every refugee exodus turn automatically into an emergency drama? Perhaps because fashionable “mixed migration” strategies dilute the original Refugee Convention of 1950, for which the UN Refugee Agency was specifically created. We may not be able to solve all of the increasingly toxic migration issues we face today, or resolve intractable conflicts, but the genuine refugee dimension is eminently manageable.
With the Sudan crisis set to worsen and parallel crises in Syria, Palestine, Yemen, Ukraine, Afghanistan and elsewhere generating their own outflows, refugee policies and practices warrant a reset. Fixing that will also benefit other types of migrants who deserve their own approaches.