Latest news with #PatrickFreyne
Irish Times
06-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Patrick Freyne on Africa's forgotten war
Chad now hosts 1.3 million forcibly displaced people, according to the UNHCR, despite itself being one of the world's poorest countries. More than half of these refugees are Sudanese, mostly women and children, who have fled the fighting between rival militaries which erupted in April 2023. It has been called 'the forgotten war' because of the lack of media coverage and global attention particularly on the plight of the refugees who live in sprawling refugee camps. The reasons why so few journalists have gone to the African country to report on the war and the massive displacement of Sundanese people include the difficulty in getting there and safety issues. Two Irish Times journalists, writer Patrick Freyne and videographer Chris Maddaloni, travelled to East Chad in April to report from the refugee camps there. READ MORE Their trip was supported by the Simon Cumbers Media Fund. They tell In the News about what they saw and heard and explore why the world has turned its back on this war. Presented by Bernice Harrison. Produced by Suzanne Brennan.
Irish Times
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Patrick Freyne and the empathy crisis
Sir, – Thank you for allowing, or sending, whichever is appropriate, Patrick Freyne to visit Chad and report on the plight of Sudanese refugees ( Returning home from Chad, I feel there's a glitch in western empathy , Opinion & Analysis, April 24th). I am not surprised to read that Patrick cannot stop thinking of the Sudanese people that he met. Most of us who travel regularly to different developing countries are the same. We cannot stop thinking of those whom we have met and their human stories sometimes describing the unthinkable things that human beings can do to each other. This is what drives us humanitarian and development workers, despite the empathy crisis which Patrick describes so well. – Yours, etc, PAUL O'BRIEN Chief Executive Officer Plan International Ireland READ MORE Dublin 8
Irish Times
23-04-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
The Irish Times view on the crisis in Sudan and Chad: a distracted world looks away
Even before Donald Trump's outrageous cuts to US humanitarian aid programmes, in Sudan and Chad the World Food Programme was trying to cope with a 40 per cent drop in funding. One of the worst humanitarian crises in the world has now been plunged deeper into an unimaginable hell. Since April 2023, 150,000 people have died in Sudan's bitter civil war between two heavily armed, pitiless militias funded by regional powers. Twelve million have now been displaced from their homes. Eight million are at risk of starvation. Of the displaced, 760,000 have crossed the border into the Ouddai province in east Chad and turned the small border town of Adre and its unofficial transit camp into Chad's third largest city, about the size of Cork, with a population estimated at 237,000. The refugees are mostly Masalit people, an ethnic group who have been murdered and raped by the RSF militia which dominates Sudan's West Darfur state. Men are not being allowed to cross the border. Many are butchered on sight by the group, which has its origins in the Janjaweed militia, responsible for the worst atrocities of the Darfur crisis of 2003-2008. Eighty per cent of those in the nearby official Aboutengue refugee camp are widows and children. The grim testimony from the two camps , recorded by Irish Times journalists Patrick Freyne and Chris Maddaloni over the past two weeks, is harrowing: graphic stories of rape and bloody killing, of torture and amputees, of starving emaciated children, of desert camps of straw huts, sweltering heat, parched land. READ MORE 'We have lost so many people,' Mariaha Abdelkareem told them, describing her journey into exile. 'The people dead in the street,' shot by the RSF. 'There were violations for the girls and the women. If you were a man, they were killing you... It's too difficult to describe this as 'war'. We lost our community and our sense of being human beings.' Meanwhile, preoccupied by the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, the world is largely silent.
