Violence broke out in mid-April between the Rapid Support Forces of General Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo and the military government led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, who himself had led a coup against the western-backed government of Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok in 2021.
The conflict has forced more than a million people to flee their homes and has the country on the brink of collapse.
For members of Greater Shepparton’s Sudanese community, it has them fearing the worst.
“The thing that we are worried about now is the hunger,” community secretary Haroun Kafi said.
“There’s no food for people and it’s very hard for them to get money too because to transact money from here, it’s very hard, all the businesses closed down because they were totally destroyed.
“The people who were in charge, they left the country and it’s getting hard. This is what we are concerned about now.”
In Shepparton, the community is mostly made up of people from two regions, Darfur in the west of the country, and the Nuba Mountains, home to Sudan’s Indigenous people, in the south.
About 13 families live in Greater Shepparton, Mr Kafi’s among them, but he also has five sisters living in Sudan, including two in Khartoum, the capital, where he says RSF militias are roaming the streets.
“It’s getting worse and worse every time because many civilians fled the country to the neighbouring countries and some to the different towns in Sudan, because Khartoum is the one that is worse now and then they are looking for the security in different places,” Mr Kafi said.
He also has a sister living in Port Sudan on the Red Sea, another in the city of Sennar, on the Blue Nile south-east of the capital, and one in the Nuba Mountains.
Sudan has lived in the shadow of violence for two decades, with hundreds of thousands of people killed in that time, and Mr Kafi would like Australia’s government to hear the voices of the victims and push whatever influence it can to enable humanitarian and peace-keeping missions to get to work in the country.
“We are trying to reach them (the Australian Government),” he said.
“There are some committees that were formed to meet the government and talk about the situation in Sudan, and the support that we need is humanitarian organisations to give food to people and protect them.
“We are very concerned about this situation and we hope that it will be over soon, otherwise the hunger is — people are going to be starved.”
32°C