DR.dk yesterday published a story about “The World’s Forgotten Conflict”, which has now displaced up to 8m of Sudan’s 49 million inhabitants (after decades of conflict already, did they ever call it home?).
They rightly call attention to an attention issue:
The article quotes Jan Egelund, the GS of Norwegian Refugee Council, as being horrified by global passivity and indifference to what’s happening in the region:
Kudos to the Scandis (I suppose?) for continuing to give a shit – even if many of them sit at home complaining about foreigners.
Many, not all.
Uffe Hansen in 2000 on his last official day as “Resident Representative” of Norwegian People’s Aid’s (NPA) de-mining programme in Tete, Mozambique.
Before Tete, he worked in Maputo, and Sierra Leone, and Malawi, and Johannesburg, and Botswana, and Kenya, and Tanzania, where he married my mother in 1967.
For most of my life, my father worked for the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) in Swaziland/eSwatini, where that NGO and others (UNHCR etc) managed and funded refugee camps (Ndzevane, Malindza) for migrants from Mozambique (civil war) and SA (apartheid), and anyone else from the region who needed it.
(I recently learned from my mother that when they decided to return to Africa after I was born in Denmark in 1975, my father was offered Sudan, Uganda, or Swaziland. They chose SD – again; my sister had been born there 5 years earlier – because it would be the safest for us.)