Jan Egeland, head of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), has told the BBC that war-stricken Sudan is in danger of becoming another failed state because civil society is disintegrating amid a proliferation of armed groups.
In addition to the two main warring parties in Sudan, the army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, Egeland said many smaller “ethnic armies” were looting and going “berserk”.
He is quoted as saying: “The parties are tearing down their own houses, they are massacring their own people.”
The BBC reports that, for the past nineteen months, a brutal power struggle has ensued between the army and the RSF, forcing over 10 million people to flee their homes and pushing the country to the brink of starvation.
In September, the World Health Organization (WHO) said starvation in Sudan “is almost everywhere”.
Egeland said: “All that I saw confirms that this is indeed the biggest humanitarian emergency on our watch, the biggest hunger crisis, the biggest displacement crisis.”
He added: “Most of Sudan is starving, it’s starving.”
Egeland warned that the world was “failing Sudan completely” by not doing enough, adding that if Europe wanted to avoid a refugee crisis, it needed to invest in “aid, protection and peace in this corner of the world”.