They try to flee Sudan, but their passports are stuck

It took a bullet to get Ashraf Malik to panic. For the first three days Latest outbreak of armed conflict in SudanThe 23-year-old dental student took refuge in his apartment in Khartoum, watching the furious fighting near his area in the Sudanese capital but feeling relatively unconcerned.

“I didn’t take it seriously. I thought it would be a minor conflict and it would be resolved within a couple of days, as usual,” he said in an interview with WhatsApp.

But then a 50-caliber bullet shattered the window, knocking out an iPhone-sized chunk in the wall above where his cousin slept.

“That’s when we decided to leave,” he said.

There was only one problem: Malik couldn’t get his passport. Two days before the fight, he submitted it to the Spanish Embassy to obtain a visa to attend a dental conference in Madrid. The Khartoum diplomatic quarter was now the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in the battle for dominance between the Sudanese Army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. The embassy was closed.

A few days later, when he posted an emergency phone contact, he finally managed to reach someone.

“When she found out that I was not Spanish, she hung up. I called again and she said, “You are not Spanish. I can’t help you,” and hung up again. I called again and told her that the embassy had my passport, but she said it didn’t matter and that they couldn’t help me,” Malik said. “Then she blocked my number.”

After nearly a month of fighting, hundreds, possibly thousands, of Sudanese with passports like Malik remain stranded because their papers are stuck in embassies whose papers international staff has long been evacuated.

They cannot flee the country as the fighting rages on, despite ongoing ceasefire negotiations and agreements that break down almost as soon as they are established. Khartoum, a city of about 5.4 million, has seen hundreds of thousands flee as the streets become battlefields and fighter jets hunt in the skies overhead. About 600 people died and thousands more were injured.

A blackened car in Khartoum, Sudan.

Fighting in Khartoum, Sudan’s capital, has been going on for nearly a month, with at least 600 deaths.

(Marwan Ali/Associated Press)

On Tuesday, senior UN aid envoy Martin Griffiths said the number of people internally displaced by the violence had topped 700,000.

“It is a race against time to provide vital assistance to those in need. The fighting must stop now,” he tweeted.

By April 24, after nine days of fighting, the foreign embassies succeeded in evacuate thousands of its citizens, including about 1000 from the European Union. But no action has been taken against people like Rasha Omer, 37, a social media manager from Amsterdam who has permanent residence in the Netherlands but whose mother Nafisa and brother Abdulrahman were in Khartoum, no action has been taken. They submitted their passports to the Dutch embassy early last month to get a visa to visit her in Amsterdam after Ramadan.

“We tried calling and emailing several times but didn’t get a response,” Omer said. “I also asked if they could send me a letter detailing what happened, in case my family could use that as a supporting document. They never answered.”

The Twitter account of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs responded on April 25 to a Sudanese journalist’s question on how to obtain passports, saying that he “deeply regrets the current situation you are in” but that the embassy was closed and “we advise you to apply for passports.” a new passport with your local authorities.”

But it was clearly impossible. Khartoum is practically a war zone and the lack of passport printers outside the capital.

“Which local authorities? There is no way the Dutch Foreign Office can be so out of touch with the reality of what is going on in Sudan that they don’t know that Sudan doesn’t seem to have any local authorities capable of handling any kind of official paperwork.” —one user Twitter. wrote back.

Other Sudanese compared their treatment to the benefits offered to Ukrainians as their country plunged into war. Thousands of people have signed a petition asking the British Parliament to set up a mechanism to allow Sudanese affected by the conflict to join their families in the UK. just like it was for Ukrainians.

” [British] The government should strive to treat all people equally, war is war, and people affected by war should be treated equally and helped,” the petition says.

Reem Abbass, 33, a writer from Khartoum, was initially convinced that the fighting will end within a week; she even assured the organizers of the seminar in France that she would attend. But as the violence escalated, she found herself in limbo, unable to plan any escape plans with her parents because her passport was in the Spanish embassy (she was planning a trip to Spain after the seminar).

“My family didn’t know what to do. I was afraid that my mother would run out of medicine, and my father was also sick; I didn’t know what our family plans were,” she said.

While she understood that embassies prioritize staff and their citizens, she expected a certain level of accountability towards visa applicants.

Women and children line up to register at the table.

Sudanese refugees arrive at a camp in South Sudan.

(Peter Louis / World Food Program)

“Okay, you are safe, you have been evacuated. Now please help us,” she said. “These are embassies. They have protection from the authorities. Open it in an hour and give us passports. And then it is our responsibility.”

Instead, the answer was random. Some embassies gave people several hours to collect their passports before destroying them. Others said they would provide a letter confirming that the passport was in the possession of the embassy.

Sudanese filmmaker Ahmad Mahmoud submitted his passport to the Swedish Embassy at the end of March to participate in the April Film Festival in Malmö. After begging for several days via email and WhatsApp to return his passport, even without a visa, he was told to look for “Plan B” and that the embassy would not be able to provide any supporting documents. As a result, the employee of the embassy, ​​with whom he spoke, stopped answering.

This infuriated Mahmoud.

“There is no need to leave your passport at the embassy,” he said, citing e-visas. “I know they do it for some nationalities. But some of us seem unworthy of holding a passport.”

In the end, Mahmoud decided to flee to Port Sudan, 13 hours from Khartoum. He’s staying at a friend’s apartment with his wife, but still doesn’t know what to do.

“My wife will not leave the country without me, and it seems to me that she is stuck because of me,” he said.

Omer, a social media manager, and her family also gave up their passports. On April 26, they headed for the border with Egypt, where the Sudanese government opened a consulate with a limited number of participants. They arrived two days later, and two days later Omer’s parents crossed over to Egypt.

Her brother Abdulrahman found his expired passport, which he renewed, but two weeks later he is still waiting to be allowed to cross the border.

Malik, a student, and his family also wanted to flee to Egypt, but waited for him to get his passport back at the Spanish embassy. As the fight neared their home, they decided they had to leave immediately.

While the rest headed for the Egyptian border, Malik and his brother went to Port Sudan. When the evacuation began, his brother boarded a ship bound for Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and then proceeded to Dubai. But Malik remains in Port Sudan.

“I am still trying to get a passport, but no response,” he said.

“I’m just stuck here. My whole family ran away. I’m the only one who’s still here.”