“A father sold his 15-year-old daughter for a sack of grain”
Amna Issac, displaced in Darfur, did not she now feeds her children “less than once a day or not at all”. After a year of war inSudan “An entire generation is at risk of destruction,” the UN warns, as millions of children are displaced, starve, forced to fight or marry.
In the Otas displaced persons camp, set up before two decades on in South Darfur, the corn porridge meal has ceased to exist. “We are all sick and so are our children. We don't have anything to eat and the water we find is contaminated,” Isak recounts.
Here, after the terrible war in Darfur in the 2000s, an entire generation was born and raised, but when war broke out again, this time from Khartoum on April 15, 2013, diplomats and aid workers left en masse. the country and stopped helping the most vulnerable.
Looting, fighting, airstrikes and roads cut off by the presence of armed men have isolated the provinces of Sudan. Today the UN estimates that there is no access to 90% of the Sudanese, who were one step before famine.
They “sell” children
Among them, warns the UN,“222,000 children may die of hunger in the coming weeks or months” and “more than 700,000 children this year”.
Already, according to Doctors Without Borders (MSF), at least one child dies every two hours in the Zamzam displaced persons camp in North Darfur, while in the Kalma camp in South Darfur“since March 15 children have been transferred to the intensive care unit every day, with more than two children dying every 12 hours”, according to the non-governmental organization “Alight”.
As reported by the scientific journal, “The Lancet”, at the small al-Buluk pediatric hospital in Khartoum they admit “every week 25 children suffering from acute malnutrition and every week two or three of them die”.
In total, nearly three million children suffer from malnutrition and 19 million are out of school, jeopardizing the future of Sudan, where 42% of the population is under the age of 14.
Adam Rigal, humanitarian representative for the refugees and displaced persons of Darfur, he has seen “dozens of children” die.
“Because of the stubbornness” of General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, head of the army, and General Mohamed Hamdan Daglo, head of the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF), who have been fighting for power for a year, “it is not enough (in Sudan) ) humanitarian and food aid”, he declares.
In addition, the factory where food supplements for children were made was destroyed by bombing, while the factories producing vaccines for newborns have been looted. All over Sudan, from Darfur in the west to the eastern areas on the Red Sea coast, which have so far escaped conflict, cholera, measles and malaria are spreading.
Adding to the health risks is horror of war. Increasingly, Sudanese organizations are sounding the alarm: in order to be able to feed their children, some parents are “selling” one of them.
A local NGO reports that a father sold his 15-year-old daughter of for a sack of grain.
Rape and child soldiers
The UN, for its part, speaks of “child marriage” or “sexual and gender-based violence, such as rape, unwanted pregnancies ».
Girls, like women, are victims, according to the UN, of abductions, forced marriages, sexual violence due to the conflicts in Darfur and al-Jazeera state, south of Khartoum, where much has taken refuge of the displaced.
UN Human Rights Council experts say they have collected information on women and little girls who have been sold into slave markets in areas controlled by DTY and other armed groups, mainly in North Darfur.
Dangers also exist for boys, as the army, paramilitaries and ethnic militias recruit and use children in Darfur, Kordofan, Khartoum and the eastern part of the country, as experts complain.
Since the first days of the war, videos have been posted online by soldiers and paramilitaries, showing teenagers piled into vans with automatic rifles in hand.
“This is the destruction of a generation,” stress its experts. UN. And this in a country where already before the war half of the children were stunted and where 70% of students aged 10 were unable to read or understand a simple sentence.
< p>source: newsbeast.gr
