The UK Foreign Office does not appear to have learned the lessons of the evacuation from Afghanistan, judging by its communications with British nationals in Sudan, the Conservative chair of the foreign affairs select committee has said.
Alicia Kearns estimated that between 3,000 and 4,000 UK nationals were stuck in Sudan, of whom at least 1,000 have asked for help to leave.
The UK airlifted its diplomats out of Sudan on Sunday, leaving UK citizens behind awaiting further instructions.
Kearns said if the UK decided that it could not attempt to rescue the remaining nationals, it needed to communicate that decision to them so that they were not left waiting for an operation that would not happen.
“We have a moral obligation to tell British nationals as soon as possible that is the judgment that has been made because they then need to make their own decisions,” Kearns told the Today programme on BBC Radio 4.
She agreed it was unacceptable that British nationals who had registered with the Foreign Office had received just two computer generated messages in the past week.
“That would suggest no lessons have been learned from Afghanistan and I have urged the government to make sure they are communicating regularly with British nationals. The reality is that unlike other countries we have thousands so perhaps sometimes phoning around is terribly difficult.”
The violence in Sudan has pitted army units loyal to its military ruler, Gen Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, against the rapid support forces (RSF), led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemedti, who is the deputy head of the ruling council. Their power struggle has raised fears of chaos and a humanitarian disaster in the country of 45 million people, Africa’s third-largest.
Battles have been raging in the centre of the Sudanese capital, Khartoum, and in its twin city of Omdurman, and a series of ceasefires have failed to hold.
The Labour party in the UK has demanded to know what the government is doing to help the remaining British nationals still in Sudan. Some Sudanese people have also expressed anger that western countries have seemingly prioritised evacuating their people over trying to stop the fighting.
Kearns said she believed British citizens in Sudan were living in a state of abject fear and that as a former British diplomat herself she was inherently uncomfortable about a situation in which the UK had evacuated its diplomats before other nationals.
She acknowledged mitigating factors such as the complexities on the ground and highlighted that the UK’s allies had also taken out their diplomats due to a direct threat to their lives.
“The focus now has to move to getting our British nationals out using the one airstrip available for evacuations,” she said. “We do have Hercules and other aircraft that are capable of landing on land that is not a formal land strip. Some of our Arab partners are using a land convoy and a boat.”
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