United Nations warns of a new wave of Sudanese asylum towards Chad
25,000 refugees from Sudan have influxed into Chad in the first week of October, fleeing the violent war that has been ongoing for 18 months. This number is considered a record in 2024, while the situation is completely unstable, as the United Nations has warned.
The United Nations Refugee Coordinator in the Region, Mamadou Dia Balde, believes, during an interview with Agence France-Presse in Geneva, that the threshold of 3 million refugees fleeing Sudan will be exceeded in the next two or three weeks.
He said, “The number has reached almost 3 million,” considering it a “catastrophe” due to the intensification of the “violence” of the conflict.
According to the latest figures issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), about 11.3 million people have been displaced, including 2,947,027 people who fled Sudan.
In an indication of the worsening conflict in Sudan’s western Darfur region, some 25,000 people, 80 percent of them women and children, arrived in eastern Chad during October 1-7, the highest number recorded this year, according to Balde.
This number far exceeds the number of displaced people recorded in the whole of September, during which some 20,270 people fled to Chad.
This country, which is among the poorest in the world, hosts the largest number of Sudanese refugees (681,944), but Balde stressed that basic services to receive them are not available, praising the generosity shown by the Chadians.
“When we see 25,000 arrivals, it is a very large number,” Balde said, calling on the international community to increase support, while the regional refugee response plan for 2024, estimated at $1.51 billion, has been funded by only 27 percent.
“This is not enough, because the number of refugees continues to rise,” he added, expecting “unfortunately that there will be more refugees in Chad in the coming weeks” due to the escalation of the conflict in Darfur and also the “recession of water” caused by the rains.
At the end of the rainy season, the United Nations hopes to be able to deliver more aid to Sudan if the parties to the conflict allow it.
“This has helped us save lives,” Balde said, but “not all the commitments made have been respected” and aid access remains “limited,” expressing his regret that there are still “barriers at the administrative level.”
Balde is in Geneva to participate in the annual meeting of the Executive Committee of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, and in Geneva he chaired talks on Sudan during which he asked for support from “development actors from now on” to help Sudanese refugees in the region integrate into the labor market, thus avoiding their dependence on humanitarian aid.
“We are calling for the development actors to act to complement” humanitarian aid, he explained, while stressing the need for peace in Sudan.
He stated that the belief that population displacement will be limited to Sudan and the region is a “big mistake,” adding, “More people are heading towards Italy and Europe, towards southern Africa,” and “there are those who are going to the Gulf countries as well.”