From Khartoum to death boats: young Sudanese go to the unknown ✍️ d. ALAA IMAD AL -DIN AL -BADRI
Since the outbreak of war in Sudan in April 2023, collective displacement has become a familiar scene, and illegal immigration, especially among young people, has become a bitter option to escape a reality in which hope is eroded day after day, thousands of young men under the age of eighteen years have left their homes in the unknown conflict areas, less security.
With the closure of the doors to the future inside the country, many began a dangerous journey that begins to cross the large desert on foot or in smuggling trucks and through hard stations in Libya, Tunisia or Algeria, and some of them even reach Morocco in search of a debate to Europe through the Mediterranean.
But the road to the dream is full of horrors:
Hunger, torture, humiliation by human traders and smugglers. The boats they can’t wait to cross the Mediterranean are only dilapidated boats, often ending in drowning or arrest. Some die before seeing the sea, others sit in smuggling prisons, and others await despair, begging an opportunity to cross.
This trip is no longer just “illegal immigration”, but rather a tragic reflection of a homeland, has its ability to contain its young people who see that drowning in the sea is easier than drowning in a reality without the future of the reasons for this phenomenon is known, but its exacerbation today is more severe:
• A collapsed economy
• A war whose end acts on the horizon
• Systematic marginalization of young people
• The absence of a clear national vision for the future
According to the reports of the International Organization for Migration, the number of Sudanese who have lost their lives at sea are worried in the past two years, and other reports have revealed that young men have been held in smuggling camps where they are exposed to serious violations.
In the end, the Sudanese young man stands today by the sea, carrying a small bag of dreams full of fear, in which he puts his only hope in a decent life, “crossing the Mediterranean” is not a romantic adventure but a miserable attempt to survive a homeland which is eroded by the conflict.
Does the sea continue to swallow the dreams of Sudanese? Or is it time for decision-makers to seriously intervene to save the remaining hope?
The young people of Sudan are his true wealth and the key to his future, and if this desperate migration continues, the country could lose the greatest of its children.
