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Worldnews

Sudanese Starve As Soup Kitchens Close Down And Warring Parties Block Aid

The pause in USAID funding is exacerbating the hunger crisis in Sudan and compounding the challenge for relief workers. The United States’ decision to suspend foreign aid is exacerbating a catastrophic hunger crisis in Sudan, where millions risk dying from malnutrition-related illnesses. Since assuming office in January, US President Donald Trump’s administration has put on leave or fired the vast majority of employees at the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and paused almost all of the global projects it funds. Last year, USAID contributed 44 percent to Sudan’s $1.8bn humanitarian response, according to the United Nations. A portion of this sum went to supporting Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs), which are neighbourhood relief groups that support hundreds of “community kitchens” across the country. “About 80 percent of the 1,460 community kitchens across Sudan were shut down [when USAID paused all funding],” said Hajooj Kuka, the spokesperson for the ERRs in Khartoum state. Since a power struggle between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) erupted into civil war in April 2023, communal kitchens have kept hundreds of thousands of people alive in regions where UN agencies and global relief organisations are unable to reach due to the wilful obstruction of aid by the warring parties, according to local and foreign relief workers. Despite the efforts of ERR volunteers, more than 600,000 people in Sudan are coping with famine levels of hunger and some eight million are on the verge of slipping into famine, according to the global hunger monitor, the UN Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC). The pause in USAID funding now risks compounding the hunger crisis. According to Iyad Agha, the humanitarian coordinator for international nongovernmental organisations in Sudan, some organisations obtained waivers from the US government to continue administering life-saving services. However, many of these services were eventually terminated after a subsequent review by the US determined that they were not necessary to sustain life. Days later, the Trump administration reversed some terminations and permitted some services to resume. Agha said Washington’s decisions appear to be “completely random”. “NGOs are paralysed and don’t know how to proceed amidst the chaos and confusion and the affected people [who need aid in Sudan] are the most impacted by all of this chaos,” he told Al Jazeera. “The problem is that if some other donors want to step in [for the absence of USAID] there is [a large gap] to fulfil,” Agha added. ERRs have taken matters into their own hands to find alternative funding. Kuka said that community kitchens have solicited funding from the Sudanese diaspora and smaller charitable organisations in order to keep providing meals to beleaguered civilians during the holy month of Ramadan, which began earlier in March. Their efforts have helped hundreds of community kitchens to reopen across the country, yet 63 percent remain shuttered since the US government paused most foreign aid, said Kuka. “There is only so much we can do. There simply isn’t enough food for people,” he told Al Jazeera. “But we have started an online drive for people to donate and during Ramadan, people tend to donate more during this time,” he added. Both sides in Sudan’s civil war are responsible for generating the hunger crisis, say local and foreign relief workers. One issue cited by some relief workers is that UN agencies recognise the Sudanese army as the de facto government. This policy has empowered the army to approve or deny aid shipments coming across the borders from neighbouring countries such as Chad and South Sudan, which the army does not control. Critics previously told Al Jazeera that humanitarians should work with the relevant authorities in each area of Sudan in order to reach as many needy people as possible. In addition, UN agencies that treat the army as the de facto government are required to base all humanitarian operations out of Port Sudan, which makes it logistically difficult to reach faraway regions such as the Nuba Mountains in South Kordofan and the sprawling region of Darfur. The army is also accused of imposing bureaucratic impediments to obstruct and delay aid shipments. “The army’s procedures are very cumbersome. It’s a mountain of paperwork,” explained Leni Kinzli, the spokesperson for the World Food Programme (WFP). “We have to deal with the different authorities: military intelligence, the Humanitarian Aid Commission, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the General Intelligence Services and National Intelligence Services. “Basically, for any [aid truck to move], we need to get a stamp from all of those agencies,” she told Al Jazeera. Analysts and relief workers also accuse the SAF of prohibiting aid to regions under RSF control. But army spokesperson Nabil Abdullah has repeatedly denied this accusation and criticised the RSF for starving civilians. Hind al-Atif, the spokesperson for the ERR in Sharq el-Nile, a sprawling neighbourhood in Khartoum, accused the RSF of exacerbating the hunger crisis. She said that the group looted all the main markets in Khartoum ahead of Ramadan and that many civilians are hesitant to leave their neighbourhoods to look for food out of fear that they could be attacked at RSF checkpoints. “People are scared to flee because the RSF often robs people of their money and phones,” she told Al Jazeera. Al Jazeera contacted the RSF’s press office for comment on allegations that its fighters are robbing civilians at gunpoint and looting markets, but the group did not respond before publication. As fighting escalates between the RSF and Sudanese army, local relief groups and aid agencies are finding it increasingly difficult to reach beleaguered civilians. In the Zamzam displacement camp, where more than 500,000 people are sheltering in North Darfur and struggling to survive a famine, the WFP was forced to suspend aid operations when the RSF shelled the camp on February 10 and 11. WFP was providing food vouchers to about 60,000 people in Zamzam through a local organisation. “Our partners on the ground were forced to evacuate. They were forced to run for their lives [due to RSF shelling] and that’s why we had to pause assistance,” said Kinzli, the agency’s spokesperson. The battle for Khartoum is also causing major displacement throughout Sharq el-Nile, pushing the few remaining communal kitchens to try and feed thousands of new arrivals. As people grow more desperate, Kuka says that many are trying to search for fish in the Nile or grow vegetables in their gardens, yet the quantity of food most people manage to eat is hardly enough. He noted that ERRs are reaching out to the European Union, as well as UN agencies, to try and fill the gap left behind by USAID. If nobody steps up, Kuka warned that hundreds of thousands of people will starve and die from malnutrition-related diseases. “We are speaking about 1.8 million people who benefit from these kitchens. What does it mean if they can no longer get food?” asked Kuka. “People are already on edge. We [as ERRs] are just trying our best to stop more regions in Sudan from slipping into complete famine.  But if this [food shortage] continues, then there will be more and more pockets of famine across the country.” Follow Al Jazeera English:...

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Worldnews

Kremlin Critic Decried For Racist Rant On Minorities Fighting For Russia

Vladimir Kara-Murza has suggested ethnic minority troops find it ‘easier’ to carry out fatal attacks in Ukraine. Kyiv, Ukraine – Vladimir Kara-Murza barely survived two suspected poisonings in 2015 and 2017 that he claimed were orchestrated by the Kremlin. The bearded, balding 43-year-old may not be as outspoken as opposition leader Alexey Navalny, who nearly died of similar nerve agent poisoning in 2020. But Kara-Murza, a Cambridge-educated historian, has been instrumental in convincing Western governments to slap personal sanctions on dozens of Russian officials. In 2023, a Moscow court sentenced him to 25 years in jail for “treason” and while behind bars, he won a Pulitzer Prize for his columns for The Washington Post. Released last year as part of a prisoner swap, Kara-Murza settled in Germany and continued his advocacy work against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s government and Moscow’s war in Ukraine. But last week, Kara-Murza’s remarks about the ethnic identity and alleged bloodthirst of Russian servicemen rattled many on both sides of Europe’s hottest armed conflict. “As it turns out, [ethnic] Russians find it psychologically difficult to kill Ukrainians,” Kara-Murza told the French Senate on Thursday while explaining why Russia’s Ministry of Defence enlists ethnic minorities. “Because [ethnic Russians and Ukrainians] are the same, we’re similar people, we have an almost similar language, same religion, hundreds and hundreds of years of common history,” said Kara-Murza. Russians and Ukrainians are ethnic Slavs whose statehood dates back to Kyivan Rus, medieval Eastern Europe’s largest state torn apart by Mongols, Poles and Lithuanians. “But to someone who belongs to another culture, it is allegedly easier” to kill Ukrainians, Kara-Murza added. His remarks made observers and Indigenous rights advocates flinch and fume. A former Russian diplomat said “measuring the degree of one’s cruelty by their ethnicity is a dead end.” The Kremlin does not specifically “recruit minorities, they recruit people from the poorest regions, and those are, as a rule, ethnic autonomies”, Boris Bondarev, who quit his Ministry of Foreign Affairs job in protest against Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, told Al Jazeera. “Only a dull man could say that in the war’s fourth year in a multiethnic society,” said Indigenous peoples activist Dmitry Berezhkov, of the Itelmen nation on Russia’s Pacific peninsula of Kamchatka. Russian liberal opposition figures, mostly middle-class urbanites, “drown as soon as they tread on the thin ice” of ethnic minority issues, he added. Ethnic Russians constitute more than two-thirds of Russia’s population of 143 million. The rest are minorities – from millions of ethnic Ukrainians and Tatars to smaller Indigenous groups in Siberia and the Arctic that have regional autonomy, albeit mostly nominal. Even in regions rich in hydrocarbons, rare earths or diamonds, the minorities live in rural, often inhospitable areas, co-existing and mingling with ethnic Russians. They all rely on Kremlin-funded television networks more than urban dwellers, often have no internet access and see the sign-up bonuses and salaries of servicemen fighting in Ukraine as a ticket out of the dire poverty their families live in. Recruits receive up to $50,000 when they sign up, and earn several thousand dollars a month – a fortune for anyone from those regions irrespective of their ethnic background. “This is colossal money for them, they will never earn it in their lives, no matter whether they are Buryat or Russian,” Bondarev said. In response to a squall of criticism, Kara-Murza wrote on Facebook on Monday that the accusations were mere “lies, manipulations and slander”. To Berezhkov, the comment further tainted Kara-Murza’s image. “In the past, [Kara-Murza’s words] could be seen as a mistake – but now, they are his position,” he said. To another minority rights advocate, Kara-Murza’s diatribe sounded like a “signal for future voters” in the post-war, liberal Russia that exiled Kremlin critics hope to return to. Oyumaa Dongak, who fled Tyva, a Turkic-speaking province that borders China, thinks Kara-Murza and other exiled Russian opposition leaders are “competing” with Putin. “It’s not him, it’s us who defend [ethnic] Russians,” she told Al Jazeera. In 2024, Kara-Murza said Western sanctions imposed on Moscow after the 2022 invasion are “unfair and counterproductive” and hurt Russians at large. He wanted the West to lift wider sanctions and instead target individual officials. A Ukrainian observer said Kara-Murza does not want ethnic Russians who can potentially vote for now-exiled opposition leaders to feel collective guilt for the atrocities committed in Ukraine. “People don’t feel guilty. If you club them in the head with moral condemnation every day, people will not admit their guilt but will hate anyone who clubs them,” Kyiv-based analyst Vyacheslav Likhachyov told Al Jazeera. “That’s why the tales about the atrocities of Chechen executioners and Buryat rapists are and will be popular,” he said. Fighters deployed by Chechnya’s pro-Kremlin leader Ramzan Kadyrov were dubbed a “TikTok army” for staged videos of them “storming” Ukrainian strongholds. Their actual role in the war is mostly reduced to guarding occupied areas, terrifying and torturing ethnic Russian servicemen who refuse to fight. But Buryats, Buddhist natives of a scarcely populated and impoverished region near Mongolia, have become notorious in Ukraine in 2022. Human rights groups and Ukrainian officials identified personal details of some Buryat soldiers that tortured, raped and killed civilians in Bucha and other towns north of Kyiv. But as ethnic Buryats are hard to distinguish from other minority servicemen with distinctly Asian features, Ukrainians often label them all “Buryats”, a community activist said. “All Caucasus natives are seen as Chechens, and all Asians are considered Buryats,” Aleksandra Garmazhapova, who helps Buryat men escape mobilisation and flee abroad, told Al Jazeera. However, the overwhelming majority of servicemen who committed alleged war crimes in Bucha were reportedly ethnic Russians. Garmazhapova survived because Ukrainian forces started shelling Russian positions, and his captors fled to a basement. “Slavs, Slavs, they were all Slavs,” Viktor, a Bucha resident who was doused with fuel by Russian servicemen who placed bets on how far he would run once they set him on fire, told Al Jazeera in 2022, just days after his ordeal. Follow Al Jazeera English:...

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Rivers LGA Criis: I Am Concerned That President Tinubu Mentioned Only My Name In His Statement. Im Not The Problem Governor Fubara

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News_Naija

CBEX Scam: Folly Of Greed

ONCE again, another cycle of financial anguish has been repeated in Nigeria. The collapse of the so-called Crypto Bridge Exchange has left over 600,000 Nigerians devastated, with N1.3 trillion disappearing overnight. The masterminds of the latest Ponzi scheme-gone-bust have vanished into thin air, just like the promises they made, leaving tears, sorrow, and regret in their wake. Despite huge losses from previous scams, Nigerians continue to fall into the same trap, driven by desperation and unchecked greed. CBEX, operated in Nigeria by ST Technologies International Limited, appeared legitimate on paper. It was registered with the Corporate Affairs Commission and even listed with the EFCC’s Special Control Unit Against Money Laundering. That is where the credibility ended. CBEX operated without a licence from the Securities and Exchange Commission, despite aggressively soliciting public funds and promising outrageous returns of 100 per cent in 30 days. Even after Hong Kong’s financial authorities issued a public warning against CBEX in April 2024 for false licensing claims and unauthorised transactions, Nigerian regulators failed to act until it was too late. The CBEX fiasco is not an isolated event. It is just the latest in a long list of elaborate Ponzi schemes and scams set up to fleece the gullible and the greedy. In the 1980s, Umanah Umanah pioneered Nigeria’s Ponzi era. MMM, with Russian origins, scammed three million Nigerians and crashed in 2016, erasing over N18 billion in people’s funds. In 2022, MBA Forex made off with more than N213 billion, using the façade of forex investment. Since 2016, at least 50 Ponzi schemes have stolen untold sums from Nigerians. They used buzzwords—crypto, forex trading, and AI-—which most Nigerians barely understand, to lure victims. The Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation estimates that over N2 trillion has been stolen from Nigerians by such dubious entities over the past decade. While poverty, unemployment, and a struggling economy make Nigerians vulnerable, it is greed, not ignorance, that drives this epidemic. Most victims are fully aware that there is a risk of loss, but think they are smart enough to quickly cash out before doomsday. Funds reserved for property purchases, wedding arrangements, tuition expenses, loans…even money pilfered from employers and relatives have been drained by Ponzi scheme operators due to Nigerians’ penchant for quick profits. This same mentality has mainstreamed sports betting, now a booming industry with in-country revenues set to hit $590 billion this year, per Statista. Nigerians must realise that there is no such thing as quick, risk-free wealth. An offer of consistently high returns with no transparency or regulation is not an opportunity; it is a trap. Will Nigerians ever see the folly of greed? Besides the scam artists, there are other enablers. CBEX, like many scams before it, thrived with the help of influencers, celebrities, pastors, and social media figures who lent credibility and trust to a lie for a fee. Such promoters must be held accountable. Influencers who push Ponzi schemes must face legal, financial, and social consequences. There should be no excuses for fronting for schemes with the potential to ruin lives and livelihoods. Regulators need to be alive to their duties. The passage of the Investments and Securities Act, 2025, is a positive step. It gives the SEC authority to regulate digital asset platforms and imposes steep penalties on Ponzi scheme operators. However, laws only matter when enforced proactively, not after the money is gone. CBEX was missing from the blacklist issued by the EFCC days before it crashed. Regulators must monitor platforms in real-time, respond swiftly to red flags, and collaborate with global partners when warning signs emerge. More importantly, massive public enlightenment campaigns are needed to stem this growing societal problem. Nigerians must return to the traditional values of hard work as a foundation of enduring wealth.  Citizens should be wary of pipe dreams sold as instant prosperity.