UN: Rhino – The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Tuesday it has decided to expand its Sudan assistance plan to include two other countries, Libya and Uganda, as the number of refugees fleeing Sudan’s 14-month civil war rises.

Sudan is already experiencing the world’s worst displacement crisis, with nearly 12 million people displaced by the civil war, while more than two million have fled across borders.

The latest expansion of the UN’s humanitarian response plan for Sudan brings the total number of African countries receiving large numbers of Sudanese refugees to seven.

The arrival of arrivals in Libya raises the possibility that refugees could continue their journey to Europe, a scenario that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has already warned against if help is not provided.

A UNHCR document published on Tuesday showed it expects 149,000 Sudanese refugees to arrive in Libya before the end of this year and 55,000 to Uganda, which has no direct shared border with Sudan and already hosts 1.7 million refugees and asylum seekers from other crises.

“This only indicates the desperate situation and the desperate decisions made by those who end up in a place like Libya, which is of course very difficult for refugees at the moment,” Ewan Watson of UNHCR told reporters in Geneva.

At least 20,000 refugees have arrived in Libya since last year, with arrivals accelerating in the past few months and thousands more unregistered, he said. At least 39,000 Sudanese refugees have arrived in Uganda since the war began, he said.

The aid response to Sudan is inadequate with a lack of resources amid record humanitarian needs as a result of multiple crises around the world and with some donors cutting spending due to domestic budget constraints. Watson said the UN plan is less than 20 percent funded.
“Refugees and families are forced to sleep in the open, and medical facilities cannot keep up with the increasing needs we are facing”, he said.