Sudanese in Switzerland join forces to highlight ‘ignored’ war

The forgotten war: the bloody conflict in Sudan has been going on since mid-2023. It has displaced millions and left widespread destruction in its wake. KEYSTONE/Copyright 2023 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Conflict has been raging in Sudan for more than a year. Switzerland’s Sudanese community is in despair. A new organisation wants to draw attention to the humanitarian catastrophe and collect donations.

The national army and a militia, Rapid Support Forces, have been waging a brutal war in Sudan for more than a year. The consequences for the civilian population are enormous: at least 8.5 million people have been displaced since the outbreak of the war. Almost two million Sudanese have fled across the country’s borders.

Every day, thousands more flee. According to the former UN Special Envoy for Sudan, Volker Perthes, this is the biggest humanitarian crisis in the world. But Europe is paying scant attention.

That includes Switzerland, where news from Africa’s third-largest country is drowned out by reports on the wars in Gaza and Ukraine. The aid organisation UNICEF Switzerland writes on its website: “The conflict in Sudan is an emergency situation. The aid workers and their partner organisations are doing their best, but resources are scarce. Unlike the war in Ukraine, for example, the global population is not particularly eager to donate to Sudan.”

El-Wathig el-Gozoli is not surprised. The 57-year-old Sudanese has lived in Switzerland for many years and works as an IT specialist in the financial sector. “Sudan is a long way away for the Swiss population and the situation is probably too confusing,” he says. Nevertheless, el-Gozoli tries his best to make the people around him aware of the situation in Sudan, for example at work or at his gymnastics club.

“I tell them that my 90-year-old father fled the country with my two sisters, that our house was occupied by the militias, and that my aunt and uncle died while trying to escape.”

‘We had to do something’

El-Wathig el-Gozoli is a member of the Sudanese Swiss Charity association, which was founded a few months ago. “When the war broke out last year, we knew we had to do something,” says the association’s founder, Nagla Fathi.

Gibreil Hamid on the left, Nagla Fathi in the centre and el-Wathig el-Gozoli from the Sudanese Swiss Charity on the right. Switzerland for UNHCR

Members of the Sudanese community immediately organised a charity event at which they collected money for aid organisations. “It was like a bazaar with music, food, readings and the sale of typical products from our homeland,” Fathi says. They divided the approximately CHF3,500 ($3,900) that they raised between two organisations: Islamic Relief, based in Geneva, and the UN refugee aid organisation, UNICEF Switzerland.

In future, the organisation’s main target group will be women and children from Sudan who are in need. In addition to the two large international organisations, they want to find more small local organisations to which they can donate the money directly. But it’s not easy, they say, because the warmongers have now taken control of almost everything.

The organisation currently has 11 active members, but it is expecting up to 50 more by the end of the year. Politically, the organisation is completely impartial, as the members repeatedly state. This independence is important to ensure everyone is working for the same aims, they say. The association is currently planning its next major charity event in September.

FILE PHOTO: Impact even abroad: The Sudanese refugee camp Metche in Chad, November 2023. REUTERS/El Tayeb Siddig

Shattered dream

It is also an attempt to combat the despair felt by the Sudanese in Switzerland. “It saddens us that Sudan is forgotten in international reporting,” Fathi says.

Sudan once had a very strong, active civil society. “We were full of hope during the mass protests in 2019,” she says. “After the fall of the Islamist dictator Omar al-Bashir, many people dreamed of a peaceful, new Sudan.” That dream is now shattered.

But why is this war forgotten by the world? “The war is not forgotten, it’s ignored,” says Roman Deckert, an independent analyst focused on Sudan who has been working in or for the country intermittently over 30 years.

In April 2019, long-time dictator Umar al-Bashir was overthrown by the military following major protests against him. This was followed by several coups and the outbreak of civil war. Keystone

He currently works from his home in Geneva for an NGO in Berlin that supports journalism in Sudan. “More reporting on this war would be important, not least to the morale of the Sudanese,” he says.

The reason this is not happening could also be due to the fact that the war cannot be easily categorised into “good” and “evil”, he says. “It’s often portrayed as if two hostile groups are attacking each other like animals,” Deckert says. This feeds into racist tropes and leaves behind a feeling that it has nothing to do with us, he says.

Local war with global entanglements

This is a misconception, Deckert says. “This war is intertwined with global affairs.” A power struggle over natural resources, for example, has been going on for a long time, he says.

“Switzerland plays a role too, in terms of the trade in raw materials,” he says. In the gold trade, for example, which is an important source of financing for the war. According to media reports, gold from Sudan frequently reaches Switzerland via the United Arab Emirates.

Switzerland should also take an interest in the many people fleeing the war, he says. Not just those from Sudan, but above all refugees from Eritrea who lived in Sudan for many years. “It can be assumed that many of them will seek refuge in Switzerland,” Deckert says.

He concedes that the 1,000 or so Sudanese living in Switzerland have not been particularly well connected so far. The members of Swiss Sudanese Charity now want to change that.

“It’s our job to make the Swiss population aware of the humanitarian catastrophe in our home country,” says Gibreil Hamid, a member of the organisation. “To tell them that people are being thrown out of homes to which they will probably never return, that women are being raped and children are starving. We have to do more, take to the streets, organise information events.”

“Before the war, the Sudanese community had little to do with each other,” El-Wathig el-Gozoli says. Everyone was very busy with their own day-to-day lives, he says. “The war has brought us together. Now it’s up to us to join forces.”

Edited by Marc Leutenegger. Adapted from German by Catherine Hickley/ts

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