What USAID Cuts Mean in Sudan: People Will Starve, Says Journalist

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Now, to Sudan, where civilians are bearing the brunt of the country’s brutal conflict. The World Food Programme now warning of starvation in the besiege city of el-Fasher and North Darfur. It’s another crisis in the devastating civil war that has been raging since April of 2023, rooted in a power struggle between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary group, RSF. Just last month, the International Criminal Court found that there are reasonable grounds that war crimes are being committed in the country. Journalists Anne Applebaum and Lynsey Addario witnessed the immense suffering firsthand, and they joined Hari Sreenivasan to discuss what the U.N. is calling the world’s largest humanitarian crisis.

HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. Lynsey Addario, Anne Applebaum, thank you both for joining us again. Anne, I wanna start with you. You’ve got a new report out from Sudan. You cite some statistics in this story, and about 14 million people have been displaced by the years of fighting. That’s more than from Ukraine and Gaza combined. At least 150,000 people have died in the conflict. And that’s probably a significant under count. And half the population, nearly 25 million people are expected to go hungry this year. You know, those are kind of abstract numbers for people when you see such large numbers. But how do you put that in perspective? You know, what, what does it feel like on the ground when you see people that are in this plight?

ANNE APPLEBAUM: I think the place in Sudan that, where those numbers came home the most for me, actually, was, it was a, it was a – I guess you’d call it a displaced person’s camp, but it wasn’t really camp. It was a group of people who were living in a former school. This is outside of Khartoum, kind of suburbs of Khartoum. And they’d been moved from wherever it is that they had been. And they’d brought some blankets with them. And they were, I mean, there weren’t tents. There wasn’t any organized food distribution. There was no evidence of any international organizations or anybody else. They were simply sleeping on the ground or lying on the ground. It was very hot. It was a hundred degrees Fahrenheit. And it was also Ramadan, so people weren’t eating much during the day. And the, the, the feeling there of stasis, you know, everybody was stuck. It wasn’t clear where they would go. It wasn’t clear how they would get out of this place and go to another place. And that sensation that the future has been cut off, that we didn’t know what we’re gonna do next or where we’re gonna go. I ran into that over and over again. 

I ran into it in young people who had been at university when the war began and suddenly realized there was no more university, or people who’d been doing jobs, they’d had careers that had just disappeared overnight. You know, Sudan had a middle class. It had people who were engaged in business. It it, you know, it had, it had universities, it had schools and all that just came to an end overnight. And that, I think is the, is the real horror of it, is this sense of hopelessness. And then, as I say, this feeling that no one’s coming and no one cares. 

SREENIVASAN: Lynsey, you have so many different powerful images throughout the reporting. This, the piece that just came out and the piece in May as well. And, and I wonder if you could just kind of describe a little bit for our audience, the context of these images. One is of, or, or several are of literally children scrambling for bowls of food on the ground. And, and, you know, tell us, is that a, a daily occurrence? Is that often, I mean, how widespread is it? It’s, I think, hard for most Americans to imagine that sort of insecurity.

LYNSEY ADDARIO: Correct. So those images are from Chad. And that situation, we were covering actually one of the e emergency response rooms. It was a community kitchen. They’re given a certain amount of money and they make as many meals as they can to feed the refugees, the Sudanese refugees, who have just come across to Chad. And that is a perfect illustration of the fact that the UN WFP, they did not have enough budget to feed people, give them one hot meal when they arrived. So thousands of people were coming across the border into Tiné, into northeast Chad, and they literally had nothing to eat. And they had no tents. They had no shelter. And they would just sit for days, sometimes up to 10 days in the sweltering sun, again, over a hundred degrees, no food. 

So when one of these trucks full of giant pots of food would come to feed people, there was a mad scramble. And people were literally jumping over each other. At the end of, at the end of one of these situations, literally, the children just could not hold their patience anymore and just started literally diving onto the ground for food. And it was complete chaos. And it just speaks to how hungry and how desperate people are. And I think, you know, inside of Sudan, inside of Darfur and Al Fashir, there’s been an official famine declared. Now we don’t have images. BBC was able to sneak in a few cameras to locals. But we have not been able to cover that because no journalists have been allowed inside to document that. But what I imagine we would see, and what has been described are, you know, literally people withering away to the bone because there is no food. It’s under siege, Al Fashir.

SREENIVASAN: Anne, you know, these images are pointing to a complete destruction of any sort of aid infrastructure. What is the relationship of the role that the United States used to play and compared to what it does now and how that kind of has an effect on the international community and the aid that flows in?

APPLEBAUM: So the United States previously supplied about 40% of the world’s humanitarian aid, but the US also supplied most of the logistics for that aid. And so that means everything from trucks that moved grain around to websites that collected statistics and allowed people to plan bank accounts and payment systems that were, that were used to pay for aid. And one of the things that happened when USAID was shut down, especially given the way it was shut down, I mean, literally just shut, people were told to leave their offices. They weren’t given access to their email, they weren’t given access to those payment systems, and they were told to go home, is that you had this cascades of chaos and even UN organizations that didn’t know they had some relationship with USAID found that they were suddenly missing something, or pieces of the puzzle weren’t working, or the funding for some of their staff was disappearing. And you can feel it all the way down to really the kind of micro street level. 

We were in a a soup kitchen, one of the soup kitchens that’s run by local Sudanese. And they told us, well, we used to serve people, I think it was five days a week, and we’ve had to cut down to three days a week because we aren’t able to get the same amount of supplies. And we’re, the supplies we’re talking about are beans, you know, or, you know, a little bit of grain. I mean, this is nothing very complicated or sophisticated, but even that tiny amount of food, and this is probably pennies worth of food, was being cut because of, of the chaos of what, of, of what happened in Washington for reasons that are still pretty obscure.
And, and the, the, the effects of that are many, and they’re multiple, and they’re still flowing through the system. And there are, there will be people who will die or who will starve, who will not have access to medicine because of the decisions that were made in Washington.

SREENIVASAN: There’s a photo of a, a little child, Lynsey, that you took, wearing red shorts and this little girl is clearly been wounded and has not gotten the treatment she needs. I mean, what happens when a child like this gets injured? Where do their parents, if they have parents, take them? 

ADDARIO: So, I mean the answer to that really depends on where they are when they’re injured, and sort of who is controlling that area. What we saw both in, in Darfur and also in Khartoum, were that the civilians, of course, are always paying the price of being injured in mortar attacks and airstrikes. And and so if they were in SAF controlled areas, they were lucky because they had a hospital that they were able to go to if they could get there. And there were trained doctors. There was minimal medicine, but enough to treat them. And so, for example Anne describes in the beginning of her story how there was shelling going on. And after one of those attacks, I ran to the hospital in the middle of the night and there were literally 36 wounded children and women splayed out on the floor of the hospital. And there were so many wounded that actually there, there absolutely was not enough medical care to take care of them, but they were being treated. They just had to triage them and figure out who obviously was most gravely injured.
In the case of that girl, she was also injured in Omdurman in, close to, on the outskirts of Khartoum, but she was on the RSF side, so she could not go to that hospital. She obviously, instead of crossing front lines, they fled then to Nyala or they fled elsewhere in Darfur. And so I don’t know exactly what kind of care she got initially, but when I met her, she was already in Junaynah, had been displaced twice, and was clearly had not been treated properly for her wounds because she had trouble with movement. The scarring had caused her – her muscles were frozen up. And, you know, it was a family that was living literally in an empty, unfinished building in Junaynah and waiting for food. And so there are so many issues at once. You have civilian casualties, you have victims of mortar strikes and airstrikes on both sides. And then you have shortage, a shortage of access to medical care and not proper, not proper nutrition to feed people so they can properly get better.

SREENIVASAN: Anne,  I’m old enough to remember an era where, you know, celebrities tried to raise the visibility of Sudan. This was just a couple of decades ago or less, right? And, and there were evangelical Christians that made it a point to, you know, raise awareness in churches on Sundays. And I wonder, I mean, you, you spoke to a the, the Prime Minister, Abdalla Hamdok who you know, ran the short-lived civilian government, and he had an interesting line in your story. It says, “the world we got to know – the consensus, the Pax Americana, the post Second World War consensus – is just no more.” How do we get from that era, just a, a few short decades ago where America seemed so interested and engaged in what was happening to the people of Sudan to this sort of a statement?

APPLEBAUM: It, it’s, it’s a, it’s been a very fast shift, actually. I mean, we maybe don’t notice it ’cause we are so distracted by all the other things that are happening inside our society, but elsewhere in the world, the, the, the withdrawal of America, the loss of interest of America is, is felt pretty sharply. And I, I don’t wanna exaggerate the role that America played in Sudan. I mean, it was, you know, it’s, it’s never been a priority in American foreign policy, but you could, you could see that it was a, it was a, it was a subject that people were aware of, cared about and were interested in. There was an exhibition at the Holocaust Museum in Washington about Darfur as well.

 And I, I think the, the, the US also, I should say, played a role then in ending one phase of the Civil War. It played a role in South Sudan, which had been part of the, of the, of, of the rest of Sudan, seceded from Sudan and created its own country. And the US had played a kind of mediating role as you know, in all that. And for Sudanese, now the – you, you often meet people who aren’t even necessarily pro-American or, or you know you know, huge fans of the United States, but you still meet people who say, where is the United States? You know, we, we miss having someone who would occasionally come from the outside who had the diplomatic clout to organize a conference or a conversation or a negotiation who could get all the warring parties in one room together you know, make them sit down and talk. And there is this feeling that there used to be more of an order. There used to be more influence of, the UN Security Council used to have its envoys that it would send to various places and they would have some status, and they were able to play a role. I mean, as the UN Security Council has grown weaker – and I talk about that a little bit in the story too – and as the US has become distracted, focused on its own problems, focused on other parts of the world, then you, as I said, you have this feeling of vacuum, you know, this feeling that there’s nobody who cares about Sudan as a whole. You know, there are, there are only, as I say, these middle powers, these, you know, neighboring countries who have interests or are of economic interests, or who, you know, have alliances with different groups you know, you’ve lost any sense of there being what we used to call, a liberal world order. So a set of rules, a set of organizations and institutions, a a pattern of people who, who could in a crisis help out.
And, you know, there’s a way actually that you can measure the decline of that system, which is, if you look at the number of refugees in the world as a whole, you can see throughout the nineties and early two thousands, it’s about the same the whole time. It’s about yeah, I think it’s about 40 million, you know, goes up and down a little bit year in, year out. And then starting about 15 years ago, there begins to be this very rapid climb. And we’re now at about two and a half times that, and I think that’s a reflection of the fact that wars aren’t solved and conflicts aren’t ended. 

SREENIVASAN: You met some interesting people on the ground who are trying to do their best. You, you spoke to a doctor who treats severely malnourished people. You met an activist. But what were they, what were they, tell us a little bit about them. What were they trying to do? What were they telling you?

APPLEBAUM: So I met a lot of Sudanese people who are very committed to staying inside their country and to doing what they can as long as it’s possible to make things better. Some of them are organized, there’s a movement called the emergency response rooms, sometimes they’re also called mutual aid groups. And they, many of the people who work, work with them or who volunteer, there are people who were part of previous democratic movements in Sudan. There was a, there was a, there was an era when there was a lot of pressure from students and professionals and others to open up Sudan, to bring back the rule of law, to create a good legal system, to make a more just state, you know, to do more reconciliation and to calm things down. This is before the Civil War broke out. And many of the people who were part of that are now running food kitchens or they’re, you know, they’re helping people get medicine or they’re raising money outside the country to, to, to bring in something.

And so you, you, you, you do have the sense that there is a, there’s a kind of patriotism and a sense of the importance of community that I think must be very old there. And then you, you do start to worry that if the situation continued to get worse or if there were if there were no end to the fighting, how many of them would become discouraged? Would they leave? I mean, you still have the possibility, you know, you still have people who want a different kind of Sudan and who can articulate it and imagine it, who are still there and who are still on the ground and working. And we have to hope that at some point, those people begin to be, have a, begin to have a larger role in how their country is run.

SREENIVASAN: So what’s next here? And is this a war that is likely to see an end anytime soon?

APPLEBAUM: So it, it doesn’t feel, right now, like it’s close to ending? I mean, there also will come a point I think, when people are exhausted by the conflict or when the, the, the, the front lines have stabilized. And, and there may be a moment, you know, in the future when you know, when we can move to a new to, to, to a new phase. But, but again, the conflict needs interest. It needs attention. It needs European and American attention as well as the attention of others in the region. There are a lot of countries who could play a, who could play a greater role there. I mean, Turkey is one, for example, as well as Egypt. It’s imaginable the end, but it doesn’t feel right now like we’re that close.

ADDARIO: I would just add, like, you know, we can’t lose sight of the fact that these are human beings. You know, some of the people that I interviewed who had fled fighting, you know, one woman had, was in an airstrike outside of Al Fashir. And literally had her baby killed off her shoulders as she was fleeing. Another woman was fleeing with her family and her son, who is very dark skinned was pulled out by the RSF and his Arabic was tested to see if it was well enough so they could decide whether to execute him or not, because ultimately they decided to spare him because they said his Arabic was good and so he was on their side. But he then watched his friends be executed in front of him. And I think these stories are happening, and we have to, we, we can’t lose sight of the fact that, you know, the sexual violence is off the charts. I mean, the amount of women we interviewed who admitted to being raped as a weapon of war, I mean, where does this leave this generation of people, some of whom have, have suffered this twice now in their lifetimes. So it’s really, you know, it is a crisis that needs an end. I think Anne’s right that there is no end in sight right now, but it would, you know, it is time for someone to step up and try to mediate this.

SREENIVASAN: Photojournalist Lynsey Addario and staff writer for the Atlantic Anne Applebaum, thank you both for your reporting and for your time today.

APPLEBAUM: Thank you. 

ADDARIO: Thank you