AID workers and activists are fearful that new regulations announced by Sudan’s army-backed government will lead to a crackdown on local relief volunteers, exacerbating the catastrophic hunger crisis affecting 25 million people across the country.
A directive announced by Khartoum state on its official Facebook page this month said all relief initiatives in the state must register with the Humanitarian Aid Commission (HAC), a government body that oversees humanitarian operations in Sudan.
The HAC was given expanded powers to register, monitor and – critics argue – crack down on local and Western aid groups by former leader Omar al-Bashir in 2006, according to aid groups, local relief volunteers and experts.
“HAC is trying to monitor and restrict the work of ERRs by forcing us to register, … and I fear they will arrest volunteers if we keep working but don’t register,” Ahmed*, a local volunteer in Khartoum, said, referring to the Emergency Response Rooms, grassroots committees that are spearheading the humanitarian response in Sudan.
Khaled Abdelraheem Ahmed, the HAC commissioner for the state of Khartoum, confirmed the new directive to Al Jazeera.
He said registration requires paying a fee of roughly $800 and submitting a list of names of the employees or volunteers in each relief initiative.
“[Nobody] is allowed to carry out humanitarian activities without registering,” Abdelraheem said.
The new directive is raising concern among ERRs. They have been instrumental in feeding, protecting and rescuing civilians from attacks since the civil war erupted between Sudan’s regular army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in April 2023.
The ERRs maintain a public stance of neutrality in an effort to preserve humanitarian access irrespective of who controls the areas they operate in at any given time.
Still, they have been attacked by both sides throughout the war.
Local activists, foreign aid workers and experts now suspect that the HAC is trying to register ERRs in Khartoum to try to monitor and coopt their activities and profit from their already meagre budgets.
Any constraints or impediments to their work could have devastating consequences for civilians in Khartoum, said Kholood Khair, a Sudan expert and the founder of the Confluence Advisory think tank.
“In Khartoum, it’s one meal a day for a lot of people in a lot of areas,” she told Al Jazeera.
“If people start missing that one meal because [ERR] volunteers are not turning up because they don’t feel safe enough to [show up and feed them], then obviously that means that famine levels will go through the roof,” Khair added.