Volkswacht Bodensee - In Sudan, 'never again' has proved untrue: UNHCR chief

And yet it is happening again, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi told AFP in a sobering interview.

Since April 2023, a war between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) has left tens of thousands of people dead and created the world's largest hunger and displacement crises.

The violence, with its "ethnic connotations," is reminiscent of what happened 20 years ago in Darfur, Grandi says. Women have been raped, children forcibly recruited, and there is gruesome violence against people who resist.

In 2003, dictator Omar al-Bashir unleashed the Janjaweed militias on non-Arab communities in Darfur. An estimated 300,000 people were killed and close to 2.5 million people were displaced.

The International Criminal Court is investigating allegations that al-Bashir, who is still at large, committed genocide and crimes against humanity, among other charges, in Darfur between 2003 and 2008.

RSF leader General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo is the most notorious member of the Janjaweed. The new conflict has already left tens of thousands dead.

"It is the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world," with an "appalling" 12 million people displaced and one-third of those forced to seek refuge in "fragile" neighboring countries, Grandi says.

Has the world forgotten about Sudan's current crisis?

"Let's be frank, I'm not sure the world is forgetting because it has never paid much attention to it," Grandi says. He is not optimistic that will change at the annual UN General Assembly in New York this week.

The situation in North Darfur's El-Fasher, the last major city in the region still under army control, is "catastrophic," Grandi said, with hundreds of thousands of people trapped amid an 18-month siege by RSF.

"Not only they're inside, hungry and desperate, but they're not even allowed to leave the city to seek help somewhere else, so they flee at night, at great risk. I'm sure that many do not make it," Grandi said.

- Crisis fatigue? -

"Compared to 20 years ago... the international attention is much less. Is it fatigue? Is it competition of other crises? Is it a sense that these crises never get solved? Difficult to tell, but people are suffering in the same way," he said.

Non-profits and UN agencies have fewer and fewer resources to address the problem, due to steep cuts in foreign aid from the United States and Europe.

"My message to European donors, European countries in particular, is that it is a huge strategic mistake," Grandi said.

Slashing humanitarian aid to people "in this belt around Europe that is so full of crisis, is a recipe for seeing more people moving on towards Europe," he said.

On another continent, another raging conflict is not receiving much international attention: the deadly civil war in Myanmar between rebel groups and the army, which has been in power since a 2021 coup.

Grandi, who just returned from Myanmar, called it "a very harsh, brutal conflict" that targets civilian communities and has uprooted about three million people -- "probably more, in my opinion."

The plight of Myanmar's Rohingya Muslim minority, of whom more than a million are living as refugees in neighboring Bangladesh, will be discussed at a high-level UN meeting in New York on September 30.

"It's true that there is little political attention for these very complicated conflicts in a world where no conflict seems to find a solution, even the big ones like Ukraine, like Gaza," he said.

But, he added, "we have to be careful not to generalize too much" about indifference.

"There are also a lot of people that do care, that do care when you tell them the story. When you explain about suffering.

"It's constant work that we have to do in that respect."

K.Sutter--VB