“I am extremely malnourished so I could not breastfeed him”: in Kalma, Ansaf Omar has been crying for a month for his one-and-a-half-year-old son, who died of starvation, like dozens of other children in this displaced camp Sudanese.
“I took him everywhere, to hospitals, to dispensaries, but he ended up dying,” the frail 34-year-old woman, who has lived in the camp since the start of the war in Darfur in 2003, told AFP. on the outskirts of Nyala, the capital of South Darfur.
In this region bordering Chad, the consequences of hunger are particularly extreme, but everywhere else in Sudan, one of the poorest countries in the world, malnutrition is on the rise: 15 of the 45 million inhabitants currently suffer from it.
Three million children under the age of five suffer from severe malnutrition, according to the UN.
And among them, “more than 100,000 children are at risk of starvation if they are not taken care of”, warns Leni Kinzli, communication manager for the World Food Program (WFP) in Sudan.
Not all children in Sudan are at risk of death, but a third of children under five are “below the average height at this age” and nearly half of towns and villages have “a retardation rate of growth of 40%”, alarms the humanitarian aid NGO Alight.
In and around Kalma, it recorded 63 child deaths from hunger in its centers in 2022.
In this camp, which houses 120,000 people displaced by the war of Omar al-Bashir, the dictator who was deposed in 2019, hunger has always existed.
But it grew in 2022, in the wake of the military putsch of October 2021 which triggered the cessation of international aid in retaliation.
Last year, there was “a massive increase in admissions and requests for emergency nutrition services” in Kalma, Alight’s director of operations in Sudan, Heidi Diedrich, told AFP.
The NGO thus announces that it has welcomed “863 new children, or 71% more than in 2021”.
And the increase in registrations was coupled with an increase in deaths: “231% more in 2022, all children over six months”.
At one such center in Kalma, Hawa Souleiman, 38, hopes to get enough to feed her baby.
“At home, we have nothing at all, we often go to bed hungry,” she laments.
And in Sudan, the economic problems are only piling up: the embargo of the Bashir era has been followed by the Covid-19 pandemic and now other humanitarian crises, such as that of Ukraine, which increase the costs. price of food and enter into direct competition for the receipt of aid.
Over the years, the WFP has halved its food rations for refugees and displaced people from Sudan “because of budgetary restrictions”, admits Ms. Kinzli.
Humanitarians are now caught in “an untenable situation where you have to choose who you help”, she continues. Each time, “it’s heartbreaking”.
– “Never in peace”?
With these cuts, Nouralcham Ibrahim, 30, and five children, can no longer make do with food aid.
“We try to earn money by working in the fields around the camp, but that doesn’t even bring us enough to eat for a day,” she laments.
In a country where the recession is total, inflation at its highest and unregulated speculation, “even bread is far too expensive,” she says.
Ansaf Omar is too afraid to venture out of the Kalma camp into an area where tribal or land disputes regularly break out.
Across the country, this violence killed nearly 1,000 people in 2022 according to the UN.
“We are never left in peace when we leave the camp to look for work,” says Ms. Omar. “There are women who are raped and men who are killed,” she said.
And all this, to try to earn less than a dollar a day in the fields.
02/26/2023 08:19:34 – Kalma IDP camp (Sudan) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
