How does the Sudanese war impact refugee movements? Eiman Salih addresses this question in the following case study of refugee movements from Sudan to Egypt.
War erupted in Khartoum, the capital of Sudan, on April 15, 2023 a Saturday morning just a few days before Eid al-Fitr and the end of Ramadan. More than 10 million people found themselves trapped between the fires of the two armies.
Internal Displacement and Refugee Movements
Prior to April 2023, Sudan was the second largest host of refugees in Africa hosting 1.13 million mostly South Sudanese as well as Eritreans, Ethiopians and other refugees, as well as having one of the largest populations of internally displaced people (IDPs) globally. The April 2023 war forced Sudanese women and men to displace internally and externally in what became the world’s largest displacement crisis in one country in the recent recorded history. As of December 2024, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that more than 12 million people in Sudan have fled their homes, with 8.8 million displaced within Sudan and 3.2 million seeking refuge in neighboring and other African countries. Families fled Khartoum once the war erupted to the nearest cities and suburbs, living in schools and sheltering centers or with extended families in hope of returning to their houses after a few weeks. Unfortunately, war soon extended to many other cities and states, and people found themselves displacing twice and sometimes three to four times with their few belongings and next to zero means of living and financial resources.
Egypt and Sudan as neighbors
Sudan and neighbouring Egypt share a long common history, and the movement of people in the region has always been a part of it. Back in 2004, Egypt and Sudan signed the so-called Four Freedoms Agreement, that gave citizens of the two countries the right to travel without visa, rights for residency, work and owning property in both countries. These conditions were especially valid for women, children and elderly men. Accordingly, when the war erupted, Egypt became a primary destination for Sudanese fleeing war.
Since the first week of the war, many people from Khartoum started heading north using buses to get to the Sudanese – Egyptian border. Khartoum airport was targeted by the RSF on the first day, flights were attacked mid runway and shot at, which led the civilian aviation authorities to halt operation immediately. Soon the land borders were overcrowded and authorities on both sides got overwhelmed with the sudden rise of numbers of exit and entry applications. Nevertheless, besides these logistic and bureaucratic difficulties, everyone who managed to make it to the borders was granted entry.
This did however not last long. In May 2023, just a month after the beginning of the war and after around 200,000 Sudanese had crossed the borders, the Egyptian authorities reintroduced visas for all Sudanese – this time not limited to men between 16-50 years old as what was the initial situation. The Foreign Affairs Ministry argued that they aimed to regulate and not to restrict entry by these measures. The decision came unexpectedly – which soon became a pattern of such visa and residency restrictions for Sudanese coming to or living in Egypt. Many people were stranded in the borders and sometimes airports, having exited Sudan and not being granted entry visa to Egypt as expected, due to sudden changes in the requirements.
Getting a visa became a tiresome lengthy process with only two offices in Sudan, one in the eastern city of Port Sudan (the new temporary administrative capital) and another in a small town of Halfa in northern Sudan close to the Egyptian border. People now had to travel through war zones and dangerous circumstances and stay for months waiting in lines to get their passports admitted. They sleep in schools, mosques and sometimes in the streets in hope of getting visas. As the options to move freely to other countries diminished, people were forced to turn to smugglers to cross into southern Egypt. The Egyptian security apparatus reacted with widespread arbitrary arrests and unlawful deportations, as documented by the Refugees Platform in Egypt and Amnesty International .
The Situation of Sudanese Refugees in Egypt
Today, refugees are regularly getting harassed, jailed and deported by the Egyptian authorities even if they can provide the necessary documents. In June 2024 Amnesty International posted that “Since September 2023, Egypt’s Border Guard Forces and police have carried out mass arbitrary arrests of Sudanese people who fled the ongoing armed conflict in Sudan for irregularly entering or staying in Egypt. The Egyptian authorities held women, men and children in cruel and inhuman conditions, including in warehouses or horse stables, pending their forced return to Sudan without giving them the opportunity to claim asylum or to challenge their deportation”.
According to Khalil Noor, Executive Director of the Refugee Plattform Egypt, Refugees described facilities with rodent infestations and overflowing sewage. One refugee said they were detained for 70 days in a base and were allowed out just once.
Sudanese refugees in Egypt face multiple other complications, as Egypt does not have an asylum system and the residence and employment laws do not include refugees. Getting registered on the UNHCR as a refugee could take from 7-18 months on average and even after that the refugee gets minimum to none of the granted rights by the refugee’s convention and in the human rights treaties. Because of the underfunding of these organizations, a very small unsustainable amount of money that varies between 450-750 Egyptian pounds (equivalent to 15-25 US Dollars) per month per refugee could sometimes be granted for a marginally small number of refugees. The refugee card does not grant access to education or basic healthcare as the Egyptian education and health systems excludes refugees. Later, specifically Sudanese refugees with UNHCR cards were denied access to all kinds of formal schooling in Egypt.
The Role of European Union
Egypt’s crackdown on refugees is backed by funding of the European Union (EU) aimed at curbing migration to Europe, as part of the EU’s approach to externalize its migration management. Since 2018 hardly any boat crossed the Mediterranean illegally from Egypt, yet nearly 20% of the refugees coming to Europe through the Mediterranean in 2022 were Egyptians. As a host country for Sudanese people, with war and genocide raging in neighbouring Gaza, and as a country of transit for those who actually plan to attempt the dangerous crossing from Libya, the EU’s interest in a crackdown on refugees in Egypt could hardly be any higher. In March 2024, six EU bloc’s leaders signed an agreement in Cairo that grants Egypt 7.4 billion Euros to boost the country’s faltering economy. It is presented as an attempt to stabilize the “troubled” region and avert another migration crisis in Europe. The three-year agreement is part of the bloc’s latest attempts to stop people crossing the Mediterranean. It requires Egypt to further militarize the border with Libya, to prevent people from fleeing via the mediterranean sea, to impede the arrival of people from war torn countries in general and to crack down on alleged smuggling networks.
In April 2024, an urgent appeal on the detention and refoulement of Sudanese refugees in Egypt was issued by the Global Detention Project. It urges the EU and UN institutions to consider calling on Egypt to end refugees’ detention and deportation to Sudan, remove visa requirements for those fleeing the conflict in Sudan, to establish procedures that guarantee access to fair and efficient asylum proceeding for all those who are in Egyptian territory, to provide immigration data on detention and deportation and to ensure transparency and accountability.
But the EU does not have any interest in an improved situation of the Sudanese and other refugees in Egypt. On the contrary: its only aim lies in preventing the movement of the people, no matter the consequences, haunted by the thought that a small group of them might potentially be trying to reach Europe.
Eiman Salih is a Sudanese architect. The revolution of 2018 made her become directly involved and vocal about human rights, women rights and freedom matters. Eiman had to flee Khartoum in 2023 with her family when the war erupted. Ever since she lives and works in Cairo.