Ongoing atrocities in Sudan

MARY REICHARD, HOST: Coming up next on The World and Everything in It: A forgotten conflict in northeast Africa.

Back in April, fighting between the military and a paramilitary force in Sudan’s capital city of Khartoum brought violence and an ongoing humanitarian crisis. The conflict has killed more than 9,000 people and displaced six million others.

BROWN: The fighting has spread to other parts of Sudan, like West Darfur where recent killings sparked warnings of another genocide in the region.

WORLD’s Africa reporter Onize Ohikere reports on the latest violence and how people are stepping in to help.

SOUND: [Crying women]

ONIZE OHIKERE, REPORTER: Earlier this month, several women huddled together along the border area that leads from Sudan to its eastern neighbor, Chad. They cried together after receiving word about the deaths of family members.

Around them, some children rode on donkeys while others held mats and small sacks of their belongings.

They are among the hundreds of thousands of people who fled into Chad from Sudan’s West Darfur region where the paramilitary group ramped up attacks this month.

The recent fighting that has plagued the country started off between two warring generals: Sudan’s army general, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and his former deputy, Gen. Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo. Dagalo heads the Rapid Support Forces or RSF paramilitary group.

SOUND: [Airstrikes]

Both men jointly led a coup two years ago after the earlier ouster of Sudan’s longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir. But disagreements over transitional leadership spiraled into outright fighting.

Luka, an Episcopalian priest, was stranded in Khartoum when the violence began. He had arrived from Sweden last December and was running a second round of discipleship classes with another group of baptisms in the works. We are not using his real name due to concerns about his safety and his future ministry in the area.

LUKA: It was a Saturday, and then they moved from the airport and they came and surrounded the church where we were living.

The rebels eventually allowed them to flee, but he left without any of his documents. It took months before he got across the border to safety in Egypt.

On November 4, Sudan’s army commanders fled their military base in the West Darfur town of Ardamata after days of attacks from RSF fighters. Salah Tour, who heads the Sudanese Doctors’ Union in West Darfur said the RSF then started a dayslong rampage across the region.

The United Nations refugee agency says more than 800 people died and hundreds of thousands have fled to neighboring Chad since then. Back in July, the UN said a mass grave with 87 bodies was found outside West Darfur’s capital of El Geneina, after similar ethnic-fueled killings.

The RSF now controls all but one major state capital in the region.

Over in northern Uganda, Texas native Jacob Lee established a Christian network in Darfur and other parts of Sudan through a Darfurian who fled south into Uganda.

His ministry has sent Bibles and other Christian books translated into Arabic to Darfur.

LEE: Most all the people that we were working with and through have left Darfur. The Christian brothers that we were working with, either to Chad or South Sudan or even here in Uganda…

The Darfur region is not new to conflict.

Ethnic violence that began in 2003 targeted non-Arabs in Darfur. As many as 300,000 people died, as reports of assaults also emerged.

In this month’s fighting, Salah Tour from the Sudanese Doctors’ Union, said the RSF and their militias targeted mostly non-Arab ethnic Masalit people.

Eric Reeves has worked as a Sudan analyst for more than two decades. Reeves says the genocide never ended after 2003, but sees additional motives.

REEVES: Finally it comes down to loot. There is no political ideology. There is no governing principle. There is no religious justification. There is just greed.

Across Sudan, half of the country’s population now needs humanitarian aid. The World Health Organization estimates that 70 percent of Sudanese hospitals are no longer operational. And in Chad, the World Food Program has warned it could end its food aid in January, as it faces a shortage of funds.

In Sudan, the violence has made aid delivery difficult and almost impossible in some areas. In West Darfur, al-Fasher is the last standing major capital city.

Here’s Reeves.

REEVES: But Al-Fasher is the most important city. It's right on the route from Port Sudan. It has the best airport in Darfur. It would be a logical place to begin humanitarian operations but that simply can't happen as long as violence is extreme as it is.

In neighboring Uganda, Lee says many of the Christians who fled the Darfur region have continued to serve in different refugee camps they moved to.

LEE: Our brothers are, they, they humble me so much. They're just on fire. They said to God, the war is not going to stop us from preaching the gospel. And so they're going into these camps, these North Sudanese brothers, and sharing the gospel and getting Bibles there.

Luka is still in Egypt, waiting to replace his documents to return to Sweden.

But he sees the local church community as perfectly stationed to assist in the absence of sufficient foreign aid. He has partnered with groups like Ananias House and is now brainstorming ways to gather a medical team and some medications back into Sudan.

LUKA: So I think this is what one of the missions of Christians to serve people when they are suffering, we have to be beside them. This is what Jesus was doing. so this is what is motivating me to go back.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Onize Ohikere.

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