Refugee chronicles: The long and lonely road from Sudan to France

Gravelines, France – On a windy, rainy February day in Gravelines on France’s northern coast, two Sudanese men in a parking lot are struggling to read a bus schedule.

Today, the two men are trying to find the next bus to Calais, 21km (13 miles) to the west.

The United Kingdom is just 32km (20 miles) across the sea. But in weather like today, dinghies full of refugees are unlikely to cross the English Channel.

The day before, the sky was clear and 249 people seeking a new life in the UK had made it across on five boats.

It’s a common endeavour – in 2023, some 30,000 migrants successfully crossed the Channel on the “small boats” which continue to drive headlines in the UK. One of them asks for help.

“We’ve been in the region for 10 days,” Hashim*, a tall man in his 20s, tells me. “We need time to know what we’ll do next. So, we’re moving from Sudanese camp to Sudanese camp, trying to get information.”

Last night, he and his friend, Yusuf*, a loud, bearded man in his 40s, slept in a camp in Dunkirk.

Hashim is certain they will find room in a tent in Calais tonight. Yusuf appears less optimistic.

Hashim has fled here from West Darfur, which has endured repeated bloody massacresfor 30 years. Yusuf is from Blue Nile, another war-torn province in the east of Sudan.

They followed similar routes from Sudan to Europe but only met in France. They decided to try to cross together to the UK, but the small boats are too expensive for them.

It’s 1,500 euros ($1,655) for a Sudanese passenger, or as much as 2,000 or 3,000 euros for supposedly “richer” nationalities such as Syrians, Afghans or Vietnamese.

The money is paid to the gangs of people smugglers – some of whom are migrants themselves.

As they are talking, a bus pulls up and they get on, following a crowd of refugees and migrants who are wet from a failed boarding attempt on a nearby beach.

I check with the driver to ensure he is heading to Calais, and they head off.

Later that day I’ll see them again, warmed, in the hangar in Calais where the charity Caritas-France welcomes migrants on the near-island that forms the heart of the port city.

Worst displacement since the partition of India

Sudan’s displacement crisis has been called the world’s worst since the partition of India in 1947 displaced at least 15 million people.

Since war broke out in Sudan in April 2023, more than 10 million Sudanese have been displaced.

Some have taken to the roads towards the Mediterranean and Europe, joining uncounted millions from the world’s disaster zones. Like generations of Sudanese people fleeing past conflict, they have often been smuggled in the backs of trucks.

But their journeys are getting quicker, taking weeks rather than, as in the past, months or years for those who went before them and usually stopped along the way to earn money in North African countries.

In the not-so-distant past, most Sudanese in Libya would work to send remittances home – a key part of the journey.

But a recent United Nations survey found that 75 percent of Sudanese in Libya intend to move on because of the violence, detention and racism they, like other Black Africans, suffer in the country.

Sudanese are also among the nationalities most commonly intercepted at sea by the Libyan Coast Guard or pushed back into Libya by the Tunisian National Guard at the land border – often followed by detention in Libya.

From mid-2023 to mid-2024, some 10,000 sub-Saharan Africans were reportedly deported from Tunisia to Libya.

In May this year, hundreds of mostly Sudanese refugees and migrants camping in front of UN offices in downtown Tunis were rounded up and reportedly expelled to the Algerian border.

In response to refugee inflows, the European Union continues funding border guards across Africa while offering minimal aid to refugee camps, hoping these measures will suffice to deter Sudanese and other sub-Saharan Africans from moving northwards.

In February, the UN noted how the Sudan conflict had worsened Europe’s migration fears and called for more support for refugees in the form of aid.

“The Europeans are always so worried about people coming across the Mediterranean,” said UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) head Filippo Grandi. “I have a warning for them … if they don’t support refugees coming out of Sudan, even displaced people inside Sudan, we will see onward movements of people towards Libya, Tunisia and across the Mediterranean. There is no doubt.”

To the people we met who were fleeing the Sudanese war, the European response is baffling.

That is especially so for those who succeed in crossing the Mediterranean to Italy and then make it via the Alps to France in hopes of reaching the UK. To them, it is the peak of absurdity that the same French authorities who try to prevent them from entering France then try to prevent them from leaving.

With UK funding since 2003 – some 543 million euros ($606m) has been set aside for 2023-2026 – the French authorities systematically stop migrants and refugees from boarding the “small boats” from France, with some officers reportedly stabbing the dinghies and slashing tents under which migrants sleep, then leaving those who do not manage the crossing with little support in France other than from a handful of NGOs.

Tea, towels and survival blankets

On that same cold, grey morning when I met Hashim and Yusuf, 12 wet, freezing Vietnamese people were walking down a coastal road south of Calais. Their boat had capsized.

On their way back from this misadventure, they met a team from the French association Utopia 56, which formed after the tragic death of a Syrian toddler named Aylan, whose body was washed to shore in Turkey in 2015.

It has some 200 volunteers who provide food, shelter and legal advice to migrants across France. On clear nights, when dinghies may be able to cross the English Channel, it “marauds” (French for patrols) the roughly 150km (93 miles) of coastal roads to provide assistance to those who don’t make it.

When we arrive at this spot on our way to Calais from Gravelines, Utopia 56 volunteers are providing hot tea, towels and survival blankets to the Vietnamese, then waiting with them for the fire brigade. The mayor of the nearby town of Wimereux turns up and agrees to make a room available so they can warm up. The firemen offer to take them there. According to the Utopia 56 volunteers we speak to, such empathy is “not that common”.

After visiting this spot, the Utopia 56 team drives to the nearby Plage des Escardines and scans the shore for possible shipwrecked migrants. There are police officers on the beach, and some follow us.

One of them asks the team about a potentially missing boat with 69 people on board. The activists’ distrust of the policeman is visible. “You know, we’ve been trained to rescue,” the policeman says, trying to reassure them. “We’re here for that. If they succeed crossing, I don’t give a f***!”

Later we learn that at around noon, a French Navy vessel rescued a boat with 56 migrants, and that three passengers (reportedly Iranian Kurds) had been reported missing. The official record states that after the rescue took place, the passengers said three people had fallen overboard. One body was found, but the two others could not be located.

Over in Calais, which we reach in the early afternoon, groups of migrants are leaving their muddy campgrounds on the outskirts of the city to head to town. They flock to the hall where Caritas volunteers welcome migrants in the afternoons, providing food, warmth and advice about their rights in both France and the UK.

In 2016, the French authorities dismantled the encampment, which had become known as the “jungle”, essentially a collection of slums with about 9,000 migrants. Since then, dozens of smaller “jungles” of tents, provided by local charities, have been forming again on the outskirts of Calais. Despite regular and often violent evictions by police, the camps continue to reform.

According to Juliette Delaplace, Caritas’s manager in Calais, the town permanently hosts “more than 1,000 migrants in different jungles, divided by communities – there are Sudanese, Eritrean, Afghan jungles. At least 60 percent of the migrants are Sudanese, it is the first nationality.”

This afternoon, it is closer to 90 percent of the 720 migrants who have come to the Caritas centre today – some new arrivals, and others from the jungles looking for a meal and some warmth.

This is not new, Delaplace adds – the Sudanese have been present for at least 10 years. But more have come since the onset of the latest war in Sudan last year. And with less money to pay smugglers than refugees and migrants from some other countries, “they stay longer than others and are more dependent on NGOs”, she says.

Despite the seemingly large numbers of Sudanese here, Calais is actually only hosting a small share of the 1.5 million new Sudanese refugees (since the war began), most of whom are being received and hosted by much poorer countries bordering Sudan. Since 2023, 600,000 people have fled to Chad and another 500,000 to Egypt, joining a diaspora there estimated at 4 million.

By June 2023, overwhelmed Egyptian authorities had suspended the visa exemption policy – first for Sudanese men, then for children, women and elderly people as well – despite a 2004 agreement on free movement. Refugees were forced to pay higher fees to smugglers or more in bribes at the border to get across.

‘Anything of value, they took’

Issa, a tall man who looks older than his 20 years, is sitting at a table in a corner with a small group of other young Sudanese, all visibly exhausted. They gather here, where there are electric wall sockets to charge their phones – a lifeline for information on crossing opportunities, the weather and news from those who have already left Calais about whether or not they made it.

Issa entrusts his phone to a friend and moves to a quieter corner for a chat.

He is from the Fur tribe, who gave the region its name: “Dar” means “home” in Arabic, making Darfur “home of the Fur”. The Fur are the region’s biggest non-Arab tribe.

Last year, Issa was in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, where he was going to university and working at a bakery to support his parents and siblings. In April, like many out-of-town students, he left the capital to spend Ramadan in his hometown of Kabkabiya, North Darfur.

That was when war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF).

Although the rivals have been vying for power over Khartoum, Darfur wasn’t any safer. The battle quickly reignited old ethnic divisions and engulfed Kabkabiya, a historical stronghold of the Arab tribal militias known as the “Janjaweed”, some of whom were repackaged into the RSF by former President Omar al-Bashir.

They quickly took the town, according to Issa. Some SAF soldiers were killed; the others fled.

The next day, the RSF entered houses and farms, shooting at civilians, and targeting the non-Arabs. Issa lost many friends.

He wipes away tears and continues: “Anything of value, they took. They also targeted women, they raped many. And they tried to enlist young men. My father forbade me to go out to avoid running into the RSF.”

Issa had already been thinking of leaving Sudan to work abroad and help his family. “The war precipitated my decision,” he explains. His father gave him money for the journey and his plan was to head straight to Europe – no particular country in mind.

In June, Issa left in the back of a pickup truck filled with 45 passengers, all non-Arab young men leaving Sudan. It was packed because the drivers were trying to make as much money as possible – the passengers who had money paid for the others.

The first payment they had to make was to the RSF, just to be allowed out of the town.

Then, they followed routes established by gold miners who have criss-crossed the Sahara over the past decade, moving from mine to mine. Issa wound his way, first to Jebel Amer in North Darfur, then Tibesti in northern Chad, then Djado in northern Niger, then Tchibarakaten at the Niger-Algeria border.

There, he had to dig for gold for two weeks, the time it took to find enough grammes to pay a people smuggler to get him over the border and on to the next leg of his journey. It is a route Sudanese refugees have used for years, but it has become much busier since the war.

He crossed the Algeria-Tunisia border in the summer of last year, amid a campaign of pushbacks by Tunisian authorities to Libya and Algeria. Taking his chances, he walked the two days it took to cross the border, was robbed along the way by bandits who took his money and phone, and then Tunisian forces spotted him.

“If they arrest you, they hand you over to the Algerian military,” Issa said. “With six others, I managed to run and hide in a farm.”

After a week of walking, they made it to the Tunisian port city of Sfax in July – barely five weeks after leaving Sudan.

“We met locals who gave us water, no more,” he recalls.

No-man’s land

In early July 2023, Sfax had witnessed a wave of violence against Black Africans, followed by the arrest and deportation of 1,200 of them to the Libyan border.

At least 28 people died in the no-man’s land between the two countries, some of thirst, and 80 more were reported missing. But Sfax had quietened down a bit by the time Issa and his friends arrived, so they scrounged up some cardboard to sleep on close to a downtown market.

Tunisia was becoming a popular embarkation point, with 84 percent of the Sudanese people who crossed to Italy in 2023 leaving from there while the previous year, 2022, some 98 percent had left from Libya.

The switch is largely down to money. In El Amra, a main departure hub just north of Sfax, Issa was quoted 1,500 Tunisian dinars ($500) for a spot on a boat going to Italy – roughly half the price charged in Libya.

But the smuggler ran off with the cash, leaving a desperate Issa who, instead, headed to Tunis to register with UNHCR, the United Nations’ refugees agency. While he waited for his appointment there – a month away – he found a job in construction paying just $7 a day.

By September, Issa had saved enough money to go back to Sfax and, this time, he was one of 35 Sudanese people on board a crude, locally assembled metal boat – and one of some 10,000 people to reach the Italian island of Lampedusa, 188km (117 miles) away, that week.

In 2023, nearly 6,000 Sudanese people reached Italy, making them the ninth-most-common nationality among arrivals.

On Lampedusa, the Italian authorities seemed overwhelmed: Issa had to wait two days to get food, was told there were no more dry clothes, and was then transferred to Bologna, in northern Italy, in the same football shirt and shorts he had worn on the boat trip across the Mediterranean.

He didn’t get any new clothes on the mainland, either. He walked 40km (25 miles) – two days – across the Alps to reach Briancon in southeast France. This route has become favoured by migrants seeking to avoid the authorities who are actively checking coastal routes.

Next, Issa took a train to Paris, where he spent two nights under a bridge before deciding to head on to Calais and, from there, try to get to the UK.

Many have heard rumours from others on the road that it is easier to claim asylum on the other side of the English Channel, where 98 percent of Sudanese asylum seekers were successful in 2023, according to government figures. Those who fled previous wars in Sudan were mostly poor people, but the new war has affected the whole population, including university graduates like Issa. Many of them speak English.

Some mention that Sudan was a British colony. Others just believe life is better across the Channel, without knowing why exactly.

Issa just wants to leave Calais; his main fear is being arrested and sent back to Italy or, worse, to Sudan. The night before we met, the police seized some refugee and migrant tents, including the one he was sharing with another Sudanese man. Caritas gave him a new one.

“In France, we’re in the jungle, in the cold, under the rain. I heard in the UK, refugees are not left in the street but are taken care of as soon as they land,” Issa says.

‘Maybe they crossed … maybe they died’

Regardless of which country they are headed for, most Sudanese making the long journey north agree on one thing: Europe, in their minds, is a safe haven.

“I heard that the European Union and member states are now highly welcoming Sudanese because of the war,” Muntasir told me when I met him travelling through Chad in October.

“But how to go there? I don’t have anything in my hands, not even one pound. Yet whenever I find a chance, I’ll travel to Europe, whether it’s legal or not.

“I really hope to travel out of Africa,” Muntasir said. “In Europe, there’s safety, you can live freely, people treat you as human, they believe not any civilian should suffer bombings and live a terrified life.”

It’s a widely held belief. As I drove along the Chad-Sudan border in late 2023, I saw refugees in newly made makeshift shelters at all the main crossings. Several months into the conflict in Sudan, the most populous was a camp in Adre, which was housing more than 120,000 mostly ethnic Masalit who fled West Darfur’s capital, el-Geneina, 32km (20 miles) away and where armed groups allied with the RSF had violently targeted them, sparking fears of ethnic cleansing.

Further north, refugees from North Darfur only had to cross the dry riverbed separating the twin border towns of Tina (in Chad) and Tine (in Sudan) to find smugglers ready to drive them to Libya. Further south in Chad’s Sila region, another 50,000 mostly Masalit refugees were waiting to be moved to camps.

The transit site in Sila’s main city, Goz Beida, was a fenced area with UN tents and trees under which the newcomers could sleep and cook.

Muntasir, a slim 28-year-old, had arrived the day before us, alone, carrying nothing but his surprisingly clean white jalabiya. He was the first refugee I met when entering the site, as, without a shelter of his own, he was sharing the benches in an unused guard hut at the gate with an old man who had arrived earlier.

Muntasir told me he had already tried to get to Europe once, in mid-2021.

At that time, he said, he was living in Nyala, South Darfur, and could not find a job despite having a university degree, resorting instead to welding to make ends meet.

Darfur had been decimated by 20 years of war, which had displaced hundreds of thousands to huge camps around Nyala – now the suburbs of Sudan’s second-largest city – dependent on scarcer and scarcer humanitarian aid.

And so, Muntasir had headed out to try to secure some sort of future or livelihood, ending up in Benghazi, eastern Libya’s main city, where he worked in construction for six months, earning 3,000 Libyan dinars ($630) to pay for passage on a smuggler’s boat.

The smuggler put him in a seaside flat with some other people.

“I was so excited, I started to build my dreams,” he said.

But as the hours passed, he started to suspect he was being cheated and decided to escape. As for the others, “maybe they crossed, maybe they died – everything can happen in Libya”.

Later, he heard about a safer, legal way to go – through resettlement via the UNHCR. When he called to register, he was given an appointment for a month later in Tripoli, 1,000km (620 miles) away – but he did not have the money for the trip there.

After a year and a half of working sporadically and sending what money he could back home, Muntasir returned to Sudan in February 2023, “empty-handed” and “sorrowful”.

Selling a phone to pay for a lorry trip

The war began two months after Muntasir’s return to Sudan, in April 2023. As he ate iftar with neighbours during a street gathering, the shelling started.

The next day, the RSF took the neighbourhood, he said. Armed men drove around, lashing bystanders with horsewhips, entering houses, beating up young men, harassing women and stealing.

“They were doing strange things, like lining up looted refrigerators in the street, we didn’t know why,” Muntasir said.

He started going out without any money or his phone for fear he would be robbed.

On a day in July – the hardest day Muntasir says he can recall – a bomb fell right next to the family house. With no idea who had dropped it, they left to shelter in a school in another neighbourhood. The next day, shelling hit the house.

In the school, the family (Muntasir, his two unmarried sisters and two brothers, their wives and 15 children) started to run out of food.

In August, they decided to leave Nyala. “We just escaped to save our lives,” he said.

They found shelter again in schools in Diri, a village inhabited by the Bani Halba Arab tribe, who had mostly stayed out of the conflict.

They didn’t have enough money to continue their journey towards Chad, but Muntasir sold his smartphone to pay $30 for his solo lorry trip to the border.

Here too, part of the money was spent on bribes or “taxes” by the lorry driver at checkpoints manned by RSF or allied armed groups. Muntasir crossed the border on foot and, on the other side, was forced to sell his other, basic mobile phone to continue his journey to Goz Beida, 150km (93 miles) inside Chad.

When I met him, his plan was to wait for UNHCR registration and resettlement in a third country.

But the old man who had welcomed him in his hut was not optimistic. “Five months I stayed here, no registration,” he grumbled.

Still, Muntasir was adamant he would rather wait than go back to Libya.

The problem he and others like him face now is that no safe and legal pathway exists to reach Europe besides resettlement, which is extremely limited. Even if you have good reason to claim asylum in Europe, you still need to get there first in order to do so.

Greater protections – but no way to access them

Illegal, dangerous routes far outpace resettlement slots from Chad, Libya or Tunisia. Only 1,100 refugees were resettled from Libya in 2023, out of some 60,000 registered by the UNHCR. Sudanese people still have to pay smugglers to cross the Sahara and the Mediterranean.

In February 2024, a boat with 42 Sudanese passengers sank off Tunisia. Two were rescued, and the others were reported dead or missing.

According to one of the survivors who spoke by phone to Al Jazeera, 38 passengers, including him, were Masalit from West Darfur, fleeing mass killings, and who ought to have qualified for asylum if they had managed to reach Europe.

In the Global North, some countries, like the United States or France, have shown more openness to granting Sudanese applicants asylum or at least temporary protection status. Since July, the French asylum court qualified large parts of Sudan, including Khartoum and most of Darfur, as suffering “a situation of blind violence of exceptional intensity”, giving applicants from those regions the right to immediate protection in France. Similar decisions have been taken in Belgium and the United Kingdom.

But European countries are still throwing resources at preventing the boat crossings.

Since 2017, European support for the Libyan Coast Guard has enabled the interception of up to 32,000 refugees and migrants a year.

Each time new routes have opened up, the EU has been quick to negotiate partnerships with transit countries to block them.

In July last year, for example, immediately after the violence in Sfax and the beginning of the ensuing pushbacks, the European Commission and some member states struck a $112m deal with Tunisia.

In March, Egypt was promised $215m in funding.

Those who do make it as far as northern France can expect long delays once they get there.

Calais is a real bottleneck on the route: many Sudanese reach the town one or two months after leaving their country, then spend many more months on daily unsuccessful attempts to cross to the UK.

The morning before we met, as on every morning since he had arrived five months before, Issa attempted to board a truck to the UK. He jumped onto the moving vehicle at a roundabout, managed to climb onto the roof, opened the tarpaulin and slipped into the load.

The lorry boarded a ferry, but once it was on board, British police dogs located him. He was handed over to the French police, who detained him in Calais port’s police station for four hours.

Since 2020, tighter checks on the trucks have made the boats option more popular, but the Sudanese are said to seldom take the sea route just because they can’t afford the rates, which are much higher than on the Mediterranean.

“We don’t pay, no Sudanese pays,” Issa says. Some pretend to have paid, beg a place, agree to take the helm even if it means risking prison in the UK, where prosecutions often focus on the people identified as “captains” of the boats, or threaten to stab the boat with a knife if they’re not taken.

That night, Issa crept onto the beach and tried to smuggle himself onto a “plastic” (a dinghy). He had only tried the small boats five or six times before. “Sometimes we have to fight with the Afghans to board, but last night there was no violence,” he says.

The 25 mostly Afghan paying passengers allowed 15 Sudanese to join them. But the police intervened and stabbed the boat.

“We ran away,” says Issa. “Many others left last night, but we don’t know if they arrived.”

*Names have been changed to protect individuals’ anonymity.