Mr. Martin Griffiths, Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator - Transcript of Press Conference with UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi, 7 February 2024

Transcript of Press Conference with UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi following Joint Launch of the 2024 Humanitarian Needs and Response Plan for Sudan and the Regional Refugee Response Plan

Geneva, 7 February 2024

I want to just say a few brief things. Firstly, the sort of the, some of the big figures Filippo [Grandi, High Commissioner for Refugees] and I are launching today, as you know, both the Humanitarian [Needs and] Response Plan for inside Sudan and Filippo leading the Regional [Refugee] Response Plan for the neighbouring countries affected by the conflict. And I’m speaking about inside Sudan, and I will limit my remarks inside Sudan.

We are about to hit a 10-month mark within a week, I think of the war. Sudan has hugely lost media attention, and this has been very, very difficult indeed. Filippo was speaking and I know about his recent visit to Sudan.

It’s very, very difficult to get attention to Sudan, which, in my view, is a place of as great a suffering as anywhere in the world today. It’s simply also a threat to the stability of the wider region – not just the immediate region, but beyond. And the lack of access for us, is very, very considerable.

So we were trying to reach, we have a plan for $2.7 billion for this year, 2024. Last year, we were about 40 per cent funded. We hope to do better this year. We’re trying to help 17.4 million people with these two plans. The one that I’m responsible for, also has half of the population – 25 million people need assistance and half of them are children. So it’s extraordinarily grave and it’s a place, as Filippo knows firsthand from his recent visit, there has been no schooling for kids since, in this last nine months, ten months. Hospitals have been destroyed. There’s been an epidemic of attacks on health institutions, looting, many of your warehouses, by the parties.

But I want to make three points really and then stop. Number one, as we have been hearing in the meeting that we’ve just come from, of course the solution to these many, many problems and – you have all the details in the briefing packs – is peace. Of course it is, and of course we are seeing no progress towards peace in these 10 months. And it’s not the only place we see no progress towards peace, but it’s one which is particularly striking because of the geographical strategic importance of Sudan within that part of the world, within Africa. I once attended an IGAD [Intergovernmental Authority on Development] meeting. This was back in July in Addis, but it didn’t lead to anything. There have been meetings of the neighbours, as you know, Filippo has been to all the neighbouring countries. But the lack of political diplomacy of any concerted effort to bring peace is a striking feature of the war in Sudan.

Number two: This is a war decided by two generals who decided to resolve their differences in a process of transition. How? Not by proceeding with an agreed plan for transition, but by deciding, let’s just go to war. Let’s do killing instead of talking. And the theme of reaching for the gun first, war as the first instrument of choice to resolve differences – nowhere is this more clear than Sudan. It’s clear in other places as well – Gaza, of course, Ukraine, certainly and elsewhere, but Sudan is a very clear example of it. Second point, the heroism of civil society: I had the opportunity to meet in New York last week with about 15 to 20 representatives from across the country, who ran emergency rooms, are, as you know, the sort of the neighbourhood, places for aid, for humanitarian aid. These people never left Khartoum, never left Darfur, and they went for a visit to brief people and they’re going straight back, they’ll be there already, back in these places, which are a place of hell, and the courage of these people – it was striking. And two things I’d like to mention about them. Number one: I asked them if they still felt that they were Sudanese, given the breakup of that country. They looked at me with shock, actually, and they said, of course we are Sudanese, we absolutely are Sudanese, we do not distinguish between whether we’re in Khartoum or South Kordofan or Darfur – we are definitely Sudanese. But there is no doubt that that identity is under threat. The second thing is, was that they absolutely refused, avoided, weren’t interested in discussing the politics of the war. They were absolutely, ruthlessly focused on being neutral humanitarian aid workers helping their own neighbourhoods. They were utter professionals, as well as brave, which I found very striking and actually quite unusual.

And then my final point is on humanitarian access. We were involved in the first Jeddah process. There was, I think, a seven-day pause, the only one has really happened. It was very helpful actually, at the time. We managed to get a lot of movements of humanitarian supplies through to places like Khartoum and others. But that was many, many, many, many months ago. Jeddah 2.0 lasted about five days. In this second Jeddah, OCHA [the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs] and the UN has the privilege of being the mediator between the two sides negotiating on access, and I have been in touch in the last couple of weeks with both generals – Burhan and Hemedti – to get them to follow up their commitments, the so-called Jeddah Declaration that you remember that they all signed, to declare their commitment to international humanitarian law and helping us on access. There was a plan to actually have such a meeting here in Switzerland, who cares where it is, frankly. They both said that they would attend and I’m still waiting, I’m still waiting to see when that happens. It is essential that these, in the immediate term, that we have access to empowered representatives of the two militaries so that we can negotiate access so they can make convoys move and access to people that we can’t reach and supplies to people who need them.

And that leads me to the last point, of course, which is the first point, which is peace. There’s nothing, there’s nothing so important, anywhere, in any of the places that we work as peace. But peace in Sudan seems to be so elusive, so far away from the reality of people who have been displaced, who are lacking the slightest of resources, but who still are brave enough to consider themselves Sudanese people, patriots of that country. God bless, thank you.

Q: Just a question to Mr. Griffiths, if possible, you mentioned during the launch this morning, that you had attempted to get the warring parties to come to Geneva to secure access. I’m just wondering what those efforts have consisted in and your hopes about this actually happening. If I can squeeze in a second quick question: The appeal was half funded last year. What can be different this time around? What will make it better this time? Thank you.

Under-Secretary-General Griffiths: Two good questions. Just a quick answer to the second one. I think it picks up on Filippo’s last point, which is the international attention. There is a direct correlation, obviously, between the international attention created by yourselves – that’s why we are your servants and always want to be with you wherever we go; come with me on my next holiday, if you wouldn’t mind – and funding. There is a direct relationship. It is, however, true that there’s limited amounts of money. Gaza is taking up a whole lot more, you know, a new one, and so forth. Ukraine is huge, you [Filippo Grandi] have just come back from Ukraine. That’s not going away. So, we will be doing our best. I’m not an optimist, actually. But, in fact, the first priority is access. Then, we will be able to use the money that we’ve got, and that goes to your first question. So, I spoke to the two generals – at least I think I did, I mean, I was told I was speaking to the two generals at the time and who am I to question the words of others. And I said we need to convene the Humanitarian Forum which is, as you know, the name simply for empowered representatives of the two militaries to come together, virtually or physically, ideally physically, like in the Jeddah 1 process. But this time run by us, not by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia or the US. This time it’s the UN who will be the mediator, to discuss precise access planning, to discuss movements and so forth. They both said, yes, that they would be happy to come, in fact, they said to Switzerland, because they ... Anyway, they said yes, we’ll come into Switzerland. I said, I don’t mind where you go, I mean, we’ll go wherever you want to go. But ideally, face to face to begin with. And I’m still waiting for confirmation of when and where they will come. And as we have heard in the earlier meeting, I think that the Sudanese Ambassador was talking about the fact that the RSF [Rapid Support Forces] has still not fulfilled its apparent promise to leave civilian structures that was negotiated on at Jeddah 1, and that this is given as a reason for not reconvening under Jeddah 2. Well, of course, I disagree with this because I have never been in a mediation where people have done everything that they promised, ever. So, we need them to come together. We need them to come together to remind them that they made those declarations which were very, very clear. And if we could get that access, we could, I think, with UNHCR [the UN Refugee Agency] and others in the lead, we could perform some humanitarian miracles because of the courage and the presence and the relentless efforts of the frontline deliverers – the Sudanese, the NGOs.

Q: [In French on political negotiations and the results of today’s event]

Under-Secretary-General Griffiths: Sudan is not the only place we see an absence of political diplomacy. We’re still waiting and hoping for a UN envoy for Myanmar, for example, as a means to kickstart political diplomacy. With the Gaza war and its effects, as you know, for example, in Yemen and the Red Sea, have taken political diplomacy backwards.

But it is striking that in Sudan, the absence of political diplomacy, which has involved essentially arguments between Member States as to who should be in which group, who should be present – is it IGAD, is that IGAD plus the AU [African Union]? Who should lead? Sudanese have objections to one of the leaders from the IGAD group, and so on and so forth. So, what we’ve seen is an argument about who’s going to sit around the table, before we even get to the issue. So that’s one of the problems on the political front.

The second one is, which I think is hugely important politically, speaking as a former mediator, is the absence of civilians. It’s all very well for generals to start a war but you need civilians, civil society, as Filippo was talking about, to help end it. And just perhaps even disorganized discussions between civilian groups and military groups would be a huge step forward. It would start giving people hope, and there isn’t any hope, at the moment, without it.

The second question was about pledges. I don’t think we had any, yes, we did hear some pledges, didn’t we? The European Union and Finland and so forth, but we weren’t expecting to hear, you know, a huge amount. I mean, it will come in and we will find out during the next few weeks. It was not a pledging conference. This is more of a launch of a plan. Last year, we did a pledging conference as well, didn’t we? More than one. And I have no doubt we’re going to have to do that this year as well.

But let’s be very clear: In every single humanitarian crisis across the world, the absence of a political diplomacy or mediation process or a peace process always makes conditions more difficult for the humanitarians in every single country that I’ve come across, where you see that.

Yes, it was striking in that last meeting that people, some of the representatives of Member States, pointed to me, of all people, to say, why didn’t you, you’re an Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations – why didn’t you start getting involved in doing some politics? Well, you know, I’m not on that side of the house. […] But we have many discussions in the UN, in New York, about Sudan and elsewhere. And in all of the discussions that I’ve been involved in, it’s all about humanitarian. And the world also uses that, you know, humanitarian access and delivery of aid is seen often as a placebo – and it’s not a placebo, it’s not a replacement for peace. Even Gaza has been all about humanitarian aid, hasn’t it? Well, that’s fine and well, but it’s not the same. And I come from a mediation background. I can see why people talk about humanitarian aid. There’s something to discuss, but doesn’t solve the problem of the people, ultimately.

Q: I’d just like to have a little more precision from you, Mr. Griffiths, about the timeline. When did you make the proposal of a negotiation here hosted by the UN? Since when are you waiting for the answer? And did they mention Switzerland, the country, or the UN in Geneva, which happens to be in Switzerland?

Under-Secretary-General Griffiths: We have been making this proposal, since Jeddah 2.0 stopped, to meet presumably in Jeddah. So, we’ve never stopped wanting to convene that group and we went through that. I think Jeddah 2.0 lasted about 10 days or something like that. And we were moving on towards having that meeting of empowered military representatives. Then, that stopped, and there was a hiatus because of the disagreement of the parties that didn’t want to meet. What the process I got involved in has been in the last couple of weeks. So, I had conversations with the two leaders within the last couple of weeks. But I knew that Switzerland had offered to be the host of talks between the two, and that’s why it is not a UN proposal to be here, although we will be delighted to be here, but it’s a Swiss proposal. There’s a Swiss envoy for Sudan, who was mentioned in my conversation with one of the generals, one of the two generals. They met recently in Rwanda, and the offer had been made and accepted. And so, as I say, I had positive responses from both sides, and then the phone went silent. And that’s now been about 10 days. Now what we’re trying to do, because of course we are not giving up, is to have at least, to begin with a virtual call mediated by the Humanitarian Coordinator, Clementine [Nkweta-Salami], who is based in Port Sudan, a UNHCR colleague, to have her begin the process, at least virtually, to get it going. I’m keen to be part of a face-to-face because I know from, we all know from our direct experience, that nothing quite substitutes for a face-to-face discussion. And so, we’re still going to push for that. Even if we have a virtual one, next week, say, you know, as a first step.

Q: Thank you for taking my question. The question is on the lack of access. I would like you to explain better that. Is it a problem that you have the green light but you don’t have security conditions for the humanitarian work? Or is it that you don’t even have the green light for the parties to do your job? If you could explain better? Do you say that to get some first approval of your proposal to make the generals meet? Was it a confirmation that they would come themselves or representatives? Thank you.

Under-Secretary-General Griffiths: Representatives empowered – I was asking for empowered representatives, people who have the authority to take decisions, obviously in consultation with their leadership about specific humanitarian operations.

And I think the answer to your first question, if I understood it rightly, was about, discussions about this: We need to move a convoy from A to B, we need to move into, across the line in Khartoum between RSF and Sudanese Armed Forces areas, the convoy of trucks, 48 trucks, will want to move on Wednesday morning or whatever, whatever, whatever, and we need your assurances that this will be allowed, and that you are on notice of this humanitarian plan. A lot of discussion as to whether that was right, we would bring in the frontline delivers, the emergency room people, who would be involved, of course, in the actual distribution in Khartoum or Darfur, or wherever, in Wad Medani also now, and then the plan would go ahead. Without that, without those assurances, you can’t move because there’s far too much experience of convoys being looted, warehouses being bombed, aid workers being killed, without the assurances of the warring parties that they would allow such and such to happen.

And this is standard practice. We do this all over the world. We do this in every single conflict. It is absolutely normal access negotiation. It is what OCHA does, it is part of our core business. And in this case, it is simply for those two generals, who decided that they wanted to resolve their difference through violence, to agree, to at least allow, as Filippo said so graphically, allow their people to survive by virtue of providing some opportunity for humanitarian aid to go through.

And so, for example, it could be a convoy which starts in Port Sudan, goes right across the country to Darfur. It could be a permission agreement to enter into Khartoum and start operating there. MSF [Médecins Sans Frontières] has a hospital, I think, still operating in Khartoum. MSF, bravest people in the world. And for us to resupply, we would need this kind of permission. It’s standard, but they are not doing it and of course, they’re not doing it because they are in full warlike mode. They see war as the current phase, not occasional pauses. And God knows we’ve seen the issue of pauses in the news in the Gaza case, and the importance and difficulties of that. So, we’re not proceeding yet, anything like where we’d like to be. We know who the two sides are. Obviously, it’s not a mystery. We know that they can decide and empower. We know that if they do that, we’ll have to work with their lower-level commanders right down to the local level. We know all that, we’ve done all that before. But we need to start by having them at the highest level and then work down through and then let the convoy go.

Q: I would like to know how many people do you think you are missing with all these red tape problems, access problems in Sudan, and people that really need the aid for surviving? And secondly, on this meeting, that is likely to happen sometime, it could be a meeting focused on humanitarian issues only or it could be the beginning of a peace talk process?

Under-Secretary-General Griffiths: Well, this very much mirrors what Filippo was saying – it would be purely humanitarian. The Jeddah process, where you have the US and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as you know, being the co-organizers and with some other Member States, I think, as observers, has one of its potential – still not actual – activities negotiating ceasefires. We decided that what we would focus on was simply the provision of humanitarian assistance, humanitarian access. And that’s a different part of Jeddah and that’s run by OCHA, that’s run by us. That’s why we are the ones making the calls to the generals and it was a negotiation that we had with the organizers of Jeddah, those two countries, to allow the UN to play that role because we did not play that role in Jeddah 1, where humanitarian access was negotiated by the US and Saudi Arabia, with the two parties. And I said that’s my job and they agreed eventually, but we are still waiting for the actual meeting to happen.

But you’re right in a sense, as Filippo said, it’s also possibly potentially the only time that we will be able to get the parties together. And, as a mediator, getting people together, really at almost any level, is a first step towards a process. So, humanitarian diplomacy, as Filippo was saying, has become a substitute for political activity. People are more inclined to meet for humanitarian purposes than for political, because it is doing good. You know, everybody can agree this is done for the best of reasons, for the best of motives and to help people. And humanitarian diplomacy, Filippo and I were very involved in Syria after the earthquake a year ago, a year ago yesterday, in working with President Assad and others to provide progress towards return of refugees. So, we used humanitarian diplomacy, and it was mingled with political diplomacy by the Arab League, of course, which eventually allowed President Assad to rejoin. So, that’s, I think the answer to your question.

Q: How many people need assistance?

Under-Secretary-General Griffiths: Half of the population of Sudan needs humanitarian assistance – 25 million people, far too many of them children. Eighteen million people are acutely food insecure. WFP [the World Food Programme] has been issuing warnings that the failure of the harvest, the failure of the agricultural cycle – because of the spread of the war - risks increasing the number of food insecure people. Eighteen million are acutely food insecure, which is 10 million more than last year. So the vectors are going all in the wrong direction. If we start seeing, and it’s, you know, we’ve seen it a bit in Gaza, if we start seeing potential famine, because that’s what this is pointing towards, these numbers, if we start seeing potential famine, as a result of the failure of, people can’t plant, people can’t harvest, people have no access to food, there is also a locust plague, just adding to the excitement of events. If we start seeing famine in Sudan – it won’t be the first time we’ve seen famine in Sudan – to add to this violence, and displacement, lack of access and lack of a political horizon, then I think we can all agree we have no humanity in us that would allow this to happen.

We cannot allow a place like Sudan to suffer all these scourges at once.

Q: As we know that there are 17.4 million people targeted, could you give us more details about the regions where these people are, are the regions situated at the borders? And as you spoke a lot about difficulty of access, could you tell us which region is the most difficult to access for humanitarian help?

Under-Secretary-General Griffiths: Well, we haven’t been to Khartoum since October, as a system. MSF is there, to its huge credit. But we have not been providing aid into Khartoum since October, for example. But the answer to the first part of your question is that almost the entire country is now covered by the spread of the war – it’s viral. It has increased in South Kordofan. I was being told the other day by a representative from the Nuba Mountains, which is thought to be in a place of peace, that it is now receiving huge numbers of refugees in for safety from other parts of Sudan. Darfur, we go in and out from Chad. But we have very little access within Darfur and it’s very dangerous. Wad Medani was the jump-off point, as you know, for Khartoum – it has now [been] overtaken by war. Filippo’s journey from Port Sudan to South Sudan, which was his plan, I think, for when he went to Sudan the other day – he was not allowed to make it because it was too dangerous to go across through Sudan down to South Sudan. So there is almost no part of Sudan which is untouched, even in the very far north of Sudan. We see, of course, people moving, displaced, trying to get into Egypt, and so forth. So there is nowhere where you can say there is a place of peace and quiet in Sudan.

And just about Gaza: We’re hearing some potentially positive news, aren’t we, about Gaza? It’s been reported that there may be the beginning of a breakthrough in the efforts mediated by Qatar and the United States and Egypt, with Israel and Hamas, over a potential breakthrough of a long period of pause to allow hostages out and Palestinian prisoners out, and then a period of so-called calm, which could lead to an end to the war now. I have no idea, I have no inside insight into this. But it is a graphic difference from Sudan, isn’t it? In Gaza, we have intense efforts by the international community. [US] Secretary [of State] Blinken is there, on his, what is it, sixth or seventh visit? Qatar is playing an extraordinary role of mediation. Gaza has at least got attention and with attention, it has international efforts to get to a peace process. So it provides us with a clear contrast, a clear distinction with Sudan, and that’s partly because you’re not there; you know, we aren’t able to get media into Sudan. I should be going to Sudan myself, to Darfur in the next few weeks, hopefully taking media. But it’s an interesting reflection on our world where we see huge efforts, and thank God for that, I’m not decrying it – I’m celebrating the huge efforts that are made for Gaza and the attention being paid to Gaza. While at the same time, Sudan is completely in the shadows, where we’re still arguing about who’s actually going to do the mediation. There’s no justice in a world where you see such contrasts, where suffering is allowed to continue in one place, while it is at least beginning to be addressed in another. Thank you very much.