MR MILLER: Good afternoon, everyone. We have a couple of guests today. Run of show: Our Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield is here along with our Special Envoy for Sudan Tom Perriello. Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield is going to kick it off with some open remarks. They’ll take a few questions about the conflict in Sudan, and then I will return for the remainder of the briefing.
AMBASSADOR THOMAS-GREENFIELD: Thank you very much and good afternoon everyone. Let me just start by welcoming Special Envoy Tom Perriello back from Chad just last week but also welcome him back to the State Department. Last week, Tom traveled to Adré Refugee Camp right along the border of Sudan. It’s a trip that I know quite well. I was at that same refugee camp just a few months ago in September. I also visited the camp 20 years ago.
Hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees had fled for this camp in the months prior – 90 percent of them women and children. And among those refugees was a six-month-old baby, born only days before the fighting broke out in Sudan. When I saw her, she was suffering from acute malnutrition – so small, so fragile, I thought she was a newborn. There is so much about her story that I don’t know: how she arrived at the MSF hospital, whether she ever left the hospital. But I think about her today as the world nears a grim milestone: one year of horrific civil war in Sudan; how she was born as her country spiraled into conflict; how she was carried into Chad, her protectors walking miles and miles to reach a semblance of safety; how she spent those formative few months in a hospital too small and weak to even cry as doctors tried desperately to nurse her back to health; and how now she reaches her first birthday having only known violence, hunger, and displacement.
April 11th should be a historic occasion as we mark the five-year anniversary of the revolution that toppled the Omar al-Bashir’s regime, 30 – his 30-year reign. Five years ago, you could practically taste the spirit of freedom, peace, and democracy in the air as women and young people took to the streets demanding change. And yet that baby I met in September is not growing up in a free, peaceful, democratic Sudan. Instead, she’s one of millions whose lives have been upended and forever altered by this war.
Today, nearly 25 million Sudanese people live in dire need of humanitarian assistance and protection; three-quarters of them face acute food insecurity. Nearly 8 million have had to flee their homes in what has become the world’s largest internal displacement crisis. We’ve seen reports of gang rape, mass murder at the hands of the Rapid Support Forces militia, of girls sold into sexual slavery, boys being made into child soldiers, of urban areas destroyed by arial weapons, and entire villages burned to the ground. And yet, as communities barrel toward famine, as cholera and measles spread, as violence continues to claim countless lives, the world has largely remained silent. And that must change and it has to change now. The international community must give more, it must do more, and it has to care more.
And let’s start with the funding piece because that’s critical. To date, just 5 percent – 5 percent – of the UN’s humanitarian appeal for Sudan has been met. Already, the World Food Program has had to cut assistance to over 7 million people in Chad and South Sudan, and that includes 1.2 million refugees like the ones I met in Adré, people who were already struggling to feed themselves and their families.
This is a matter of life and death. Experts warn that the coming weeks and months, over 200,000 more children could die of starvation. The United States, for our part, plans on significantly increasing our funding in the days to come.
More than just lacking aid, however, humanitarian workers have been systematically obstructed from…
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