Sudan's Warring Generals Have Abandoned Kalma's Displaced for 22 Years

Twenty-two years. That is how long the Kalma displacement site in Beliel Locality, South Darfur, has held human beings who fled violence and were never allowed to go home. Twenty-two years is long enough for a child born in the first months of the camp to finish secondary school. It is long enough for a government to build a hospital, run an ambulance, and dig a drain. Instead, a sick person in Kalma who falls ill at midnight must hope to survive the journey to Nyala, seventeen kilometres away, on foot or on the back of whatever transport can be found.

Ask yourself what kind of country lets this happen. Then ask what kind of men hold the guns that keep it happening.

The facts are not hidden. Kalma covers roughly nine square kilometres. Its residents are not only the families who arrived in 2004. Recent arrivals have come from Nyala itself, from the villages around it, and from Al Fasher in North Darfur, which has become a graveyard of the current war. Many households have moved into sturdier mud-brick homes over the years, a quiet testament to the resilience of people who were supposed to be temporary. But the most vulnerable have not been so fortunate. Female-headed households, elderly people, and newly displaced families still live in makeshift shelters built from sorghum stalks, grass thatch, and palm-leaf mats. A thatch roof does not stop a rainstorm. A palm mat does not stop a scorpion, a snake, or a cold night in the rains.

Then there is the water. Seasonal flooding inundates Centres 1, 3, 5, and 8 each rainy season, and poor drainage keeps Centre 4 and other low-lying ground under standing water. Think about what that means for a family whose only home is woven grass. Think about a toddler sleeping on wet earth, a grandmother who cannot climb to higher ground, a mother who must choose between staying dry and staying close to the only water point. Flooding in a displacement camp is not a natural disaster. It is a predictable outcome of neglect, repeated every single year, that someone with authority has chosen not to fix.

The healthcare failure is just as damning. The nearest hospital sits in Nyala, and there are no ambulance services, especially at night. When a woman goes into obstetric crisis at three in the morning, or a child develops a fever that becomes convulsions, the system that should respond simply does not exist. Each preventable death in Kalma is a verdict on everyone who had the power to build a clinic, a road, or a single ambulance and did not.

Who is responsible? Sudan's war has been fought between the Sudanese Armed Forces under General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the Rapid Support Forces led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti. Both have turned civilians into collateral and, in the RSF's case, into targets. UN investigators and rights organisations have documented killings, sexual violence, and looting by RSF fighters across Darfur, including in El Fasher, and the International Criminal Court has been seeking accountability for crimes in Darfur for two decades. These generals did not invent Darfur's misery. They inherited a region that had already been burned once, and then they chose to burn it again, this time over control of the state. Every bullet fired over a presidential palace is a bullet not fired at a hospital, a well, or a drain. Every million dollars spent on weapons is a million not spent on the people sleeping in the rain.

This is not only a Sudanese story, and it is not only about generals. Darfur's displacement camps have long been treated by the outside world as a humanitarian line item, a problem to be managed rather than solved. Donors fund emergency rations and then leave. Regional powers and foreign arms suppliers keep the fighting supplied while they debate their influence in Khartoum and Port Sudan. Africa's own institutions, the African Union and the regional bloc IGAD, have repeatedly issued statements of concern in place of enforceable pressure. We have seen this pattern before in Darfur, in South Sudan, and across the Sahel. When the powerful profit from disorder, the powerless are told to be patient.

So what must change? The answer is not complicated, only urgent. The African Union must suspend any official recognition of the parties that block humanitarian access and must back independent monitoring of Darfur's camps. The UN Security Council must impose targeted sanctions on commanders from both sides, freeze their foreign assets, and refer the documented atrocities to the ICC without further delay. Donors should stop treating Kalma as a permanent emergency and fund durable infrastructure instead: a drainage system for Centres 1, 3, 4, 5, and 8, emergency transport for night-time medical cases, a clinic within the camp, and sturdy shelters for the female-headed households and elderly residents who still live under sorghum stalks.

There is a model for what works. Botswana built one of Africa's most stable democracies by insisting on prudent public spending, clear property rights, and institutions that answer to citizens rather than to a single man with a gun. Mauritius turned a sugar-dependent island into an economy that protects its people through rule of law and transparent administration. Senegal showed in 2024 that a democratic transfer of power is possible even after a period of tension. None of these countries is perfect. All of them prove that the rule of law, independent courts, and accountable budgets produce results that bullets never will.

Sudan can join that list, but only if its people demand it. Kalma's residents, and the civil society groups that serve them, must be given space to speak, to organise, and to hold local authorities to account for every pound of aid and every promised clinic. Diaspora Sudanese should push their own governments and diaspora networks to fund concrete projects rather than rallies. Ordinary Africans should ask their governments, their parliaments, and their journalists one question every time Sudan appears in the headlines: what are you doing for the people in the camps?

Twenty-two years is too long. A child born in Kalma when the camp opened is now old enough to ask why the ambulance never came. We owe that child an answer, and the answer must be written in drains, clinics, courtrooms, and sanctions, not in another communiqué.

Based on reporting by RELIEFWEB