The UN’s top humanitarian and emergency relief official told NPR that why world leaders have not paid more attention to the civil war in Sudan is the “billion dollar question,” and called for the United Nations Security Council to “wake up” and help stop the violence.
Tom Fletcher, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, who recently spent a week in Sudan’s Darfur region, called the area the “epicenter of suffering in the world right now.” Describing his visit on Weekend Edition Sunday, Fletcher said, “You’re going through checkpoint after checkpoint manned by child soldiers. You’re meeting people who are starving, who’ve been displaced many times, victims of sexual violence, victims of horrible torture, brutality.”
He warned that his organisation’s work in Sudan is only 32% funded, forcing aid workers into “brutal life-and-death choices” about which projects to cut or keep. Fletcher noted that the United States has cut back foreign aid funding this year. “We’re doing our best,” he said, “but we’re overwhelmed because we’re dealing with hundreds of thousands of people escaping… and that’s just from el-Fasher alone, let alone across the whole of Sudan, where the needs are enormous.”
In October, the city of el-Fasher was captured by the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) after an 18-month siege. The United Nations estimates around 200,000 civilians were trapped in el-Fasher when the army withdrew. Advocacy groups say many were systematically killed, and satellite imagery shows possible mass graves in el-Fasher and beyond, raising fears of suspected genocide. More than 20 years ago, between 2003 and 2005, Darfur experienced another genocide in which an estimated 200,000 people were killed.
Fletcher called el-Fasher a “crime scene” and said the UN is determined to get more aid teams into the area and “try to push for accountability” over the bloodshed. He urged urgent help from global organisations to stop the violence. “We need the world to act,” he said. “We need the [United Nations] Security Council to wake up. We need the great powers of the world to basically say, let’s stop arming this conflict.”
He blamed several factors for the lack of action on Sudan’s war, which has raged since April 2023 when fighting erupted between the Sudanese army and the RSF in Khartoum and spread nationwide. Fletcher said social media has “shortened our attention spans,” and that other crises, such as the war in Gaza, have received more international attention. He described the current moment as “a brutal period of indifference and apathy” and warned that online misinformation can make people feel suffering far away is unimportant. “You can’t put a wall around millions of people who will flee from conflict and climate crisis,” he said.
Fletcher also reflected on his first year in the job, saying he had visited Gaza twice, Darfur twice, the front lines in Ukraine and Goma in the Democratic Republic of Congo. “I get to see the worst of inhumanity, I’m afraid,” he said, adding: “However, I also see the best of humanity and the people who are out there responding. We need that outpouring of generosity. I refuse to believe that people have lost that sense of human solidarity and generosity.”
