By Clotaire Achi and Elizabeth Pineau
PARIS (Reuters) – Some 245 evacuees from Sudan, including 195 French nationals, landed in Paris on Wednesday, expressing relief at escaping the heavy fighting and chaos.
Sudan erupted in warfare on April 15, derailing a transition to civilian rule, since when the paramilitaries have embedded themselves in residential districts and the army has sought to target them from the air.
The fighting has turned residential areas into battlefields. Air strikes and artillery have killed more than 500 people, wounded more than 4,000, destroyed hospitals and limited food distribution in a nation where a third of the 46 million people rely on food aid.
“The past few weeks, we felt a rise in inter-community tensions with looting, carjacks, shootings between communities,” humanitarian worker Charline Petitejean told Reuters at the Paris headquarters of her NGO Solidarités International.
The 27-year-old had been working for three months in Sudan but arrived back in Paris Wednesday morning.
“When the decision was made to evacuate, there were so many things that needed to be done that there was no time for fear”, she said, adding that now she was in France she was worried for her Sudanese colleagues who stayed and “for the Sudanese people as the humanitarian context worsens”.
She said she would like to return to Dafur as soon as possible.
Several countries have evacuated nationals by air, while some have gone via Port Sudan on the Red Sea, about 800 km (500 miles) by road from Khartoum.
“I felt completely paralysed,” said 28-year-old PhD student Leila Oulkebous, another evacuee. Oulkebous was out doing thesis interviews when fighting broke out nearby.
“I didn’t know how to get out…,” she said. “I’m very, very relieved. (…) I will continue to have nightmares about it.”
Franck Haaser, cooperation councillor at the French Embassy in Sudan, was relieved that there were no deaths among those evacuated.
“We lived through a week of chaos … it was very difficult,” he said.
“The shooting was all across the city. We didn’t directly see the shooting, but with the intensity of the fighting, there were stray bullets everywhere, broken windows in all buildings, it was chaos. Chaos.”
(Reporting by Elizabeth Pineau, Ardee Napolitano, Clotaire Achi, writing by Juliette Jabkhiro, Ingrid Melander, Charlotte Van Campenhout, Editing by Nick Macfie and Alex Richardson)
