‘There’s been a systematic targeting of health facilities’ in Sudan, says MSF board president

We spoke to Dr Tammam Aloudat, President of the Board of MSF Holland, who’s recently returned from Sudan.

Tammam Aloudat: Thank you for having me, Jackie. And very happy to be here. The past few weeks, which I’ve spent in the region of South Darfur, as well as the past years and particularly the past 16 months which we, as MSF, have spent working in most of the conflict-affected areas, there are so clearly a few elements. One is that this fairly neglected and left-to-the-side in the global news and global policy conflict, is one of the most horrendous we have seen – despite working actively in more than 70 countries now, including most of the armed conflicts. This deterioration in this situation has many layers.

One of them is the cruelty of the conflict itself. The warring parties are, repeatedly, systematically targeting civilians, targeting health facilities. And now we have, pretty much, 80% of the health system of the country, disabled. This gets compounded by, at this point, a heavy rainy season. This means what you’ve seen and the collapse of the dam, but also floods, contamination of water and extreme difficulty in mobilising any goods or services across the country. Where I worked in South Darfur, in a town called Mahalla. We’ve seen the effect of the immediate conflicts which have moved to Al Fashir, as you mentioned. But we are seeing the aftermath of it as well. The violence hasn’t ended when the fighting ended. There’s criminality that is expanding every day, sexual violence – we are seeing the consequences of that, both in cases that have been weeks and new cases. And we are following up with that, in the sense that there’s pretty much no ability to afford food or transportation, which means in our hospitals we’re seeing more and more malnourished, malnourished children with severe infections.

Jackie Long: I mean, it is a terrible cocktail. We know the torrential rains have made things worse. That is a disaster of nature’s making. But so much of this is man-made, isn’t it? We know that both sides use aid as a weapon. How do aid agencies like yours, for example, deal with that? Are you getting any aid through?

Tammam Aloudat: Yes. And absolutely. The rain is natural. But there’s nothing natural about the inability – when you have 10 million people displaced because of the conflict, the rain and the floods stop being a natural phenomenon where people can cope with their own means. The conflict itself has made them vulnerable to the effects of the floods. The torrential rains are a consequence of the manmade conflicts. Now, there has been a systematic targeting of health facilities and a systematic complication of accessing by humanitarian actors. I mean, again, if I go back to Darfur, we crossed the border from Chad. We are able, to an extent, to deliver supplies. This is limited extensively by the circumstances. And we believe that under the circumstances, it is a shameful shortcoming from both policy-makers and donor governments and the humanitarian system, how little there is there that is being pushed insistently, both in stopping the conflict and in delivering humanitarian aid.