NAIROBI, April 13 (dpa) – Sudan’s civil war has triggered the world’s largest humanitarian crisis, with around 11.6 million refugees and internally displaced people, according to the United Nations.
About 4.5 million people have fled Sudan to neighbouring countries, but a lack of prospects and uncertainty over an end to the three-year conflict are pushing many to move on, Mamadou Dian Baldé, regional director of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Nairobi, said.
“People are arriving in Greece. They are arriving into Italy. They are arriving into Spain,” Baldé said.
So far, nearly 14,000 Sudanese refugees have reached Europe via the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean, while more than half a million are currently in Libya, he added.
“We need to ramp up, we need to increase the support to refugees,” he said, including the countries hosting them.
“If people think that this conflict can continue like this and that it is not going to affect the stability in the region, it’s just a big, big, big mistake.”
Baldé spoke ahead of the third International Sudan Conference on Wednesday in Berlin, which seeks to put the war back on the international agenda.
He said that major funding gaps in aid programmes for Sudanese refugees must be addressed. Countries seeking to limit arrivals should invest more in host nations and refugee accommodation, he said.
Given the scale of suffering among refugees inside and outside Sudan, as well as widespread violence — particularly against women and girls — humanitarian assistance must be urgently scaled up, he stressed.
“I have never witnessed something like this for my 27 years working in this field,” Baldé said.
–NNN-dpa