When Omima Hassan, a 44-year-old a senior healthcare assistant, first heard of the news of the fighting in Sudan, she thought it was fake. She couldn’t believe that her family and loved ones were suddenly trapped in a war zone.
“My brother, my auntie, my cousins – they all live in Sudan. And it’s not just them, you feel like all Sudanese-British people are your family,” she said.
But she was soon forced to accept the reality of the war. On 15 April, intense fighting broke out between the Sudanese armed forces and a paramilitary group known as the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), killing hundreds of people and sending thousands fleeing for safety.
Hassan gathered with other members of Britain’s Sudanese community in a cafe in Edgware Road in west London. It is a small, but well-established community in the UK. In 2020, the Office for National Statistics estimated there were 35,000 people in the UK who were born in Sudan, and about 20,000 Sudanese nationals. There are no estimates of the number of British nationals of Sudanese descent living in the UK.
Hassan said: “There are more than 4,000 British-Sudanese people in Sudan right now. It was the Easter holidays, it was Ramadan and just now it was Eid. Many people went to Sudan to celebrate with their families.
“It has even affected our own Eid in the UK and it ruined everything. We had planned to do a big event where we hired a hall and a children’s trampoline and an ice-cream van. But we had to cancel it because nobody was in the mood to celebrate.”
The Sudanese-Nubian association had organised the gathering to provide people with a space to discuss what they could do to help the situation in Sudan.
Irfan Nour, a British-Sudanese Londoner, said his wife woke him at about 9am on Saturday to tell him to switch on the news as fighting had broken out in Sudan. “It is always a bad experience to hear of war. I was scared and worried for the welfare of my family. I still have my brother and my cousins in Sudan. My first actions were to try to make calls to check on them.”
Nadir Banda, a British-Sudanese community organiser, said people stuck in Sudan felt “frightened” and “abandoned” by the international community. “The British government should put pressure on the country and use the influence they have to stop the fighting,” he said.
“It seems a lot like racism to us here in the British-Sudanese community. The British government were very slow to act and it seems like they have only recently bowed to media pressure.”
Nour believes Britain has a duty to support Sudan. “Historically, Sudan is a former British colony and the British government has got a big influence in Sudan. But we feel as though the British government has let us down – there has been no major effort to stop the war and the human situation in Sudan looks very scary,” he said.
Mohammed Elnaiem, a researcher and Phd student at the University of Cambridge living in Leeds, also spoke of the difficulties of watching the conflict and evacuation unfold from the UK. He said: “The conflict has shown glaring inequalities between the Sudanese people. While I’m happy for every person who has safely gotten out, I’m at the same time heartbroken for those who are stranded because they don’t work for international organisations or have foreign passports.”
Elnaiem said the vast majority of Sudanese people were trying to find safe haven, but there is no open humanitarian corridor. “There are limited options to evacuate for most Sudanese people. They are being subjected to highway robberies and extreme violence and lots of people who were trying to evacuate died en route.”
He spoke of his fears of what happens when the international community leaves the country. “The vast majority of Sudanese people are being left behind in a country that’s far more volatile, with the absence of international staff and diplomats. The best they can do is ride a bus to Egypt where my cousin, who is a US citizen, has been stranded for 22 hours at the border.
“The Egyptians are being more strict now that more people are showing up. Ethiopia has closed its borders almost entirely because it’s requesting things like a foreign visa, which is not feasible in the condition of war.”
