For Whom the Bell Tolls

Competitive colonialism, nationalist, revolutionary and ethnic aspirations, rogue rulers and industrial and criminal interests created an unbroken chain of wars, killing, maiming and displacing millions

- Snigdhendu Bhattacharya

‘Why are the mountains grumbling like a charged diarrhea? How long shall I walk these winding roads of displacement? I behold cracked feet and broken faces, Starveling children clinging to dehydrated mother’s breast, Can’t you see the eyes baked white in hunger?’ —‘The Meditation of a South Sudanese Refugee’ by Geraldine Sinyuy

FLICKERING lights, just a few kilometres away in the middle of a desert in the dead of night, were all 31-year-old Nooraldeen Awad had as he crossed a border he had to. It was September 2023. He was alone, with only some food and water in his bag. He wasn't scared—he had nothing to lose.

A Sudanese national, Awad entered Egypt illegally in July 2023, three months after a horrific civil war broke out in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF). The war triggered what has been described as the worst displacement crisis in the world since the 1947 Partition of India, which displaced at least 15 million people.

The Sudanese civil war has already displaced over 12 million since April 2023—a quarter of the country's population. The two months Awad spent in Egypt gave him no hope. He decided to try his luck in Uganda. But to get there, he first had to cross Sudan and then South Sudan. In September 2023, when an Egyptian car dropped Awad about 90 minutes from the Sudanese border at 2 am, he had to rely on himself.

It was dark and quiet. The lights at the Argeen checkpoint on the Egypt-Sudan border appeared like distant stars. But he couldn't go straight towards the light. He would get caught. He had to reach the border at a distance from the checkpoint where he could slip through the barbed wires in the dark. When he finally reached it, a Sudanese soldier guarding the border pointed a gun at him. “I was still not afraid. I don't know why,” Awad says.