International donors promised almost $1.5 billion in additional aid for conflict-stricken Sudan on Monday as the United Nations warned that the African country’s humanitarian crisis is worsening.Sudan has been rocked by fighting for more than two months as the military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces battle for control of the country. Sudan’s Health Ministry said Saturday that more than 3,000 have been killed in the conflict, which has decimated the country’s fragile infrastructure and sparked ethnic violence in the western Darfur region.
The donations were pledged following a U.N.-sponsored meeting co-hosted by Egypt, Germany, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the African Union in the Swiss city of Geneva.
“The scale and speed of Sudan’s descent into death and destruction is unprecedented,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said during the meeting’s opening session.
Prior to the meeting, the U.N.’s emergency aid program for Sudan, launched after the fighting broke out April 15, had received less than 17% of the required $3 billion, Guterres said.As the meeting progressed, numerous state representatives pledged contributions. Qatar’s foreign minister, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, said the Gulf kingdom would be giving $50 million to the program.
Katja Keul, minister of state at Germany’s Federal Foreign Office, said Berlin would pledge 200 million euros (nearly $219 million) of humanitarian assistance to Sudan and the region.Speaking by a web link, the U.S. Agency for International Development’s administrator, Samantha Power, said Washington would be donating an additional $171 million for Sudan.
The U.N.’s top humanitarian official, Martin Griffiths, said the United Nations would inject a further $22 million into the program.It remained unclear if Saudi Arabia and Egypt, two of the conflict’s key mediators, would provide further financial contributions to the humanitarian initiative.The international aid group Mercy Corps expressed concern that the nearly $1.5 billion fell well short of the needed $3 billion.
On Sunday morning, the country’s warring forces began a three-day cease-fire, brokered by the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. It’s the ninth truce since the conflict began, although most have foundered.The conflict has turned the capital, Khartoum, and other urban areas into battlefields.
