Hundreds of trucks carrying United Nations aid across Sudan are stuck for lack of fuel, the UN’s top official in the country has said, adding a new obstacle to a relief operation already strained by war, funding cuts and a campaign of drone strikes on power and fuel facilities.
“We have hundreds of trucks stuck because of a lack of fuel,” Denise Brown, the UN resident and humanitarian coordinator for Sudan, told UN News in an interview published on 3 November. “If we don’t have fuel, we can’t move. We can’t provide food to people who need it, or support children suffering from severe acute malnutrition.” She did not say where the trucks are waiting or for how long.
Why permits are not enough
Aid agencies still face “bureaucratic impediments”, Brown said, but there has been “huge progress regarding our visas and permits”, and the UN has “demonstrated that we can do our job”. Her point was that a permit does not move a truck. Relief also needs fuel, routes that are safe to drive, food to load and money to pay for it, and each can fail on its own.
Those pressures are arriving together. The World Food Programme, which she said moves thousands of trucks carrying food to places where local markets have none, has had its convoys hit seven times this year and 20 times in two years, costing lives and food. Funding is tighter too: “WFP is cutting not just the number of people it serves in Sudan, but also its rations.” In parts of Darfur and Kordofan, she added, months of poor rainfall are a “new dimension” of an existing crisis, and people are on the move looking for food.
The people waiting for that food have little to fall back on. Millions remain displaced by the war, Brown said, and the health system has been “decimated”. Severe acute malnutrition, according to studies by the UN children’s agency UNICEF that she cited, exceeds the emergency threshold in many parts of the country, particularly those most affected by the fighting.
Drone strikes, fuel queues and dialysis
Brown tied the fuel shortage to drone strikes over the past couple of weeks that she said appear to target civilian infrastructure, including sources of energy and fuel. She said she does not know where the drones are launched from.
Colleagues from the World Health Organization, she said, were at a hospital just outside Khartoum when a strike cut its electricity. The hospital had no generator and no solar panels, and the 25 people there who need dialysis had their treatment stopped. Brown was relaying what her WHO colleagues saw; she did not name the hospital or say when it happened or what became of the patients.
In Khartoum, she said, queues for fuel stretch for kilometres. Tuk-tuk drivers, who earn a daily wage carrying people to work and to market, are waiting several days in a row for fuel and earning nothing in the meantime.
Fuel on paper, fuel in the tank
Sudan’s energy minister paints a different picture of national supply. Diesel, petrol and cooking gas are enough to cover demand for at least three months, he said, according to Sudan Now, an online news outlet. He described shortages in some areas as temporary and linked them to financial procedures, import schedules and swings in regional oil prices. He blamed the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces for the attacks on power and fuel sites and acknowledged that the system cannot be fully protected. On Monday, Sudan Tribune reported, he said several fuel ships had arrived and begun unloading, and that he expected the crisis to ease in the coming days.
The two accounts need not contradict each other. Supply that is sufficient on paper is not the same as fuel reaching a particular relief fleet, and the sources do not show at which point the trucks have been held up.
For Brown, the stakes are in the camps. Visiting Abu Shandi, a camp for displaced people in Blue Nile state in south-eastern Sudan, a couple of weeks ago, she said people told her: “We need food.” She had to answer, “Please be patient.” “How can I tell people to be patient and wait for food?” she asked. “They have no money. They’ve left everything behind.”