The head of the World Health Organization (WHO) told BBC’s Today that hunger “is almost everywhere” in war-torn Sudan.
The situation in Sudan is terrifying because of the famine and the massive number of people who have to leave their homes. It is now the most significant migration in the history of the world.
In addition, he said that 12 million people had already been forced to leave their homes because of the “shallow” attention the world paid to Sudan, which was partly because of race.
Since April 2023, when Sudan’s army and the rebel Rapid Support Forces (RSF) started a civil war, thousands of people have died.
“Imagine destruction, people being forced to move, diseases spreading everywhere, and famine,” Dr Tedros told the True story.
He said he had earlier visited a hospital and a camp for people who had been forced to leave their homes in their own country.
“You see, there are many children, skin and bone, emaciated.”
According to Dr. Tedros, about 25 million people, or half of Sudan’s population, “need support.”
He said that Sudan “is not getting the attention it deserves” and that other recent African wars had the same problem.
“I believe race plays a part in this. That is how I feel now. “Now we see the pattern.”
“Especially in Africa, I think the attention is low,” Dr. Tedros, who grew up in Ethiopia during a war, said.
“That is the sad part—you see it all the time, not just in Sudan,” he said.
The head of WHO said, “I know the smell of war, the sight of war, and the sound of war.”
“From that, I can understand how it impacts others, and I remember my mother praying I survive a day at a time – growing up, survival of the day was a big thing; I see the same thing in Sudan and Gaza.“
He went on to say that other humanitarian disasters received only a small part of the help that was given to Ukraine. For example, Tigray in Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Syria did not receive the same care.
Dr. Tedros called the situation in Sudan a “tragedy” and asked the major media to pay more attention to it.
In August, a group of experts backed by the UN declared a famine in a camp with about 500,000 homeless people near the besieged city of el-Fasher in Darfur, which is one of the areas most badly hit by the war.
Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who is in charge of Sudan’s army, and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, who is in charge of the RSF, worked together to stage a coup in 2021. However, they later got into a fight that led to a civil war in Sudan last year.
People say that the United Arab Emirates (UAE) gives money and weapons to the RSF, but the UAE rejects this. They also say that Saudi Arabia is friendly with the Sudanese government.
Several attempts to end the war through diplomacy led by Saudi Arabia and the US have failed.
