Politics
The House Opinion Article | Sudan’s forgotten crisis must be ignored no longer
May 2025: Refugees at a Red Cross water point in a transit camp, Chad (Credit: Associated Press / Alamy)
3 min read
“I’m so traumatised that sometimes I wonder whether those things really happened to me. Or was it all just a dream? El Geneina was like a little paradise,” said a Sudanese refugee in January 2025. “Now the rivers of Darfur run with blood.”
Rivers of Blood: Escaping Darfur, a new report for the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Sudan and South Sudan, exposes Sudan’s “forgotten crisis”, so described by Lord Alton, a long-time advocate of the Sudan. It tells the story of the April 2023 civil war through the voices of the Sudanese and Darfuri refugees in eastern Chad, mainly in the Adré Transit Camp. This camp, 30 miles from the Chad/Darfur border, is now a temporary township of more than 240,000 deprived people. The report urges the UK government to act, work for an end to this endless humanitarian crisis, and create the framework for peace and development for all the different peoples of Sudan.
The UK government should confront the structural inequalities of the Sudanese region, it argues, rather than replicate “cycles of aid dependency and neglect”. It suggests displacement, such as that in the Adré Transit Camp, is likely to become permanent.
The needs and economic, structural and other forms of development in eastern Chad, also an impoverished region, must be addressed. Sudanese refugees arrive there daily, traumatised, starving and telling of the suffering, killings and atrocities in the current civil war. The strength of this report is the field work, which draws on the voices of the refugees in the camps in eastern Chad.
Emergency and violence have long scarred Darfur, an area comprising 12 million people from different ethnic groups with incompatible economic needs
The present Darfur conflict started well over 20 years ago with the ‘Darfur Genocide of 2003-2005’; cities, countryside and people were devastated, leading to the deaths of an estimated 300,000 people and displacement of over 2.7 million people. Tragedy, emergency and violence have long scarred Darfur, an area comprising 12 million people from different ethnic groups with incompatible economic needs.
The violence re-emerged as another civil war erupted in April 2023 between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) – a paramilitary group and successor to the Janjaweed – and the government-controlled Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF). Sudan has been a forgotten conflict. Through this whole period, Sudan has been in an emergency of violence, rape, killings and atrocities, especially in Darfur.
Darfur has been the epicentre of the tragedy with so many killings, the last massacre in El Fasher as recent as October 2025.
The APPG’s new report looks at the effects of these tragedies on the populations, the destruction of communities, villages, murder, sexual violence and rape as a weapon of war. It admires the resilience of communities which provide support to returnees, both Sudanese and Chadian, who try to carve out some future life.
The report’s views are those of the authors; it is not an official publication of the House of Commons or House of Lords but a publication of the APPG on Sudan and South Sudan.
It is dedicated to my late husband, John Sandwich, formerly treasurer for some 20 years. Sudan was a country close to his heart on which he worked in the hope of a better future.
