One million people face death in Sudan

“WE are here because they came on camels and horses and attacked us. We lost everything; the village, our home, all our things, our animals, our lives.”

Throughout the bright orange plains and gentle hills of Sudan’s Western Darfur region the stories are all the same. Here, scattered in more than 30 makeshift encampments upwards of one million people, mostly women and children, face likely death unless humanitarian organisations can organise quickly enough to deliver sufficient shelter and food.

Even with the best efforts of aid agencies, it is expected that hundreds of thousands of these people will perish before enough help arrives. “Regardless of what we do, up to 300,000 people will die anyway,” the UN’s Sudan chief, Mike McDonagh, said yesterday.