On the road in Sudan with the UN’s outgoing High Commissioner for Refugees

Only a few of the world’s capital cities do not have a functioning airport. For nearly three years, Khartoum in Sudan has been one of them. The last time the runway was scheduled to reopen, in October 2025, it was hit by a drone strike the day before.

So we drive. Past gold mines and watermelon fields; past minarets and pyramids and mounds of building supplies; past billboards advertising bottled water and military strongmen. We drive along a two-lane highway that is often narrower than the carpet of waste plastic on either side. Litter is the landscape of a failed state. We pass through checkpoints — some run by teenagers with guns, just about recognisable as the army; others by people described as volunteers. The road from Port Sudan on the Red Sea to Khartoum is more than 800km long. If you’re lucky — or if you worry more about oncoming darkness than speeding accidents — you may make it before nightfall.

When we arrive in the city, there are no traffic jams, no chorus of beeps. The gridlock has gone. So has four-fifths of the population. Even if we weren’t in a convoy of white UN SUVs, we could speed along the banks of the Nile with surreal ease. Until last March, Khartoum was the front line in a brutal civil war. Bullet holes riddle the buildings like flies on a rotting carcass. The city’s few skyscrapers are wrecked, among them the Corinthia Hotel, built with Libyan money and nicknamed Gaddafi’s Egg. Sudan has been at war for much of the seven decades since independence, but never before has the conflict come to the capital.

I came to Sudan with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Filippo Grandi, on his final trip in the role in December. As a young field officer, Grandi was present when the agency opened a headquarters in Khartoum. Now, more than three decades later, he found himself paying his respects to it. The office’s prefab blocks had been burnt to the ground. Its metal roofs lay twisted and charred. “I’ve seen many of our offices damaged across the world, but I’ve never seen this,” said Grandi. “Never in Kabul or in Syria.” He did not comment on the human leg bone lying a few metres away.

Global humanitarianism is in crisis. The movement that grew up after the Holocaust, drew strength from the cold war and fed off the international outrage at the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda in the 1990s is bewildered and besieged. Wealthy governments — and their publics — have tired of paying for development aid and emergency assistance. They have tired even more of taking in refugees from the world’s war zones and failed states. In his first term as US president, Donald Trump denied having referred to unwanted migrants as coming from “shithole countries”. In his second, he boasted of doing so. This month, he ordered the US to withdraw from 31 UN bodies, including the UN Democracy Fund and the Office of the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict.

UNHCR, the refugee agency, escaped the cull. But its funding fell by one-quarter last year, due to Trump’s cuts to the state department. In 2025, for the first time in its 75-year history, UNHCR raised less than half of the funds it deemed necessary for its mission. Nearly 5,000 staff were made redundant. UN humanitarian agencies must “adapt, shrink or die”, the state department said this month.

Meanwhile, the need is growing. States are failing, war is returning. Deaths in armed conflicts reached an 18-year high in 2022, according to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program. The number of people displaced nearly doubled over the past decade to 118 million. Three countries account for most of the rise: Ukraine, Venezuela and Sudan.

Sudan is the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. The US has described the ethnically targeted massacres that have taken place as genocide. Nearly one-third of the population — 15 million people — have left their homes. More than two million have fled to Chad and Egypt. A few thousand have found their way on small boats across the English Channel to the UK, where 99 per cent have their asylum claims accepted. But the vast majority remain in Sudan. Amazingly, refugees have also been arriving in Sudan, fleeing violence in neighbouring South Sudan, Eritrea and Ethiopia.

Yet, starved of resources, UNHCR had decided to cut more than half of its staff in Sudan. “You know those games where an extra level of difficulty is added and you have to find a solution? It’s exactly like that,” Grandi explained.

So now, a few days from retirement, Grandi had come to Sudan to visit a camp for displaced people and negotiate with the government. Grey-haired and in his late sixties, Grandi stood tall and tidy in the ruined office courtyard where UN staff once ate at the café and filmed videos thanking a couple of major donors. “Thank you, Mr Yanai,” he said, in one message for the founder of Japanese clothing retailer Uniqlo. He filmed a US media interview, remembering to insert thanks to Trump, the man who had slashed his budget. Even in the late morning sun, he chose to wear a jacket: “It contains you.”

Why had UNHCR’s building been torched? One theory: the staff kept dollars in the office out of distrust of local banks, so the paramilitaries, the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), looted the building then burnt it down to cover their tracks. But the discovery of the leg bone and a human skull raised a grimmer possibility. Perhaps, during the fight for Khartoum, the RSF kept and killed prisoners here.

The greater mysteries were about the future. What could the UN achieve in a bloody civil war that most of the world was happy to ignore? Should it rebuild its office, or would the paramilitaries soon be back? And what could be salvaged of the world’s humanitarian system? Perhaps the dreams had always been too big.

Humanitarianism never had a golden age, but even so it was not braced for the current disregard. Grandi had seen the darkest moments in Rwanda and Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo. “When I was in Goma in 1994, people briefly cared. We got so much aid we didn’t know what to do with it.” He drew a line from rich countries’ hoarding of Covid-19 vaccines to their subsequent cutting of aid budgets. “I think Covid unmasked the selfishness of the global north.”

In five days on the road with Grandi, I don’t hear anyone refer to him by his name. To even his closest colleagues, he is the high commissioner, the HC. There is a point to this deference. Grandi’s job is to convince politicians to fulfil their legal obligations. Moral authority is his best weapon. “It can be leveraged more than you might think. Most of the time they ignore us but . . . ”

He describes his role as that of a diplomat, a negotiator and a leader. What he most reminds me of is a priest. He has a soft, patient, devout manner. He grew up in a middle-class, Catholic family in Milan, the son of an architect. Faced with a year of military service in 1981, he instead chose conscientious objection: 18 months working at Amnesty International. In 1984, he went to work in Thailand with Cambodian refugees. A doctor, sensing his innocence, took him to watch a child dying of malaria. “It was a shock, but it also said, well, this idealism is not wrong — it’s still needed.”

Humanitarianism, Grandi quickly learnt, was always political. In the 1950s, the US did not resent refugees; it actively encouraged people to leave the Soviet bloc as a means of discrediting communism. Grandi found there was plenty of funding for Cambodian refugees because the US, since Nixon, had drawn closer to China and therefore its allies, the Khmer Rouge.

He was appointed high commissioner in 2015, beating rivals such as former Danish prime minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt. Like nearly all his predecessors, he was a European, but he was the first to have spent his entire career in the UN — a life-long humanitarian. He’d served in Zaire, seeking to protect civilians from Rwanda-backed forces. In Afghanistan, he’d worked to organise the first elections after the US-led invasion. He ran UNRWA, the agency in charge of assisting Palestinians displaced by the creation of Israel. Grandi’s staff appreciated that he knew the frustrations of obstructive governments. His influence could be doubted; his empathy could not.

In Sudan’s war, too, aid is entangled with politics. In 2019, the dictator Omar al-Bashir was overthrown when the military refused to follow his order to shoot at student demonstrators. But the youthful revolution soon fizzled. “We were idiots, to think you could undo 30 years in one go,” one revolutionary lamented.

Power was sucked up by two generals, Abdel Fattah al-Burhan of the Sudanese army and Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti, of the paramilitary RSF. The two men fell out in 2023. In the ensuing fighting, the military retained control of Port Sudan and eventually regained Khartoum. The RSF dominated the west and south of the country.

In late October, 2025, the paramilitaries took the city of El Fasher, once home to 1.5 million people, meaning they controlled nearly all of the Darfur region of western Sudan. Survivors reported that RSF gunmen had gone door-to-door, executing men and raping women. Thousands of people were killed in a few days. The war’s total death toll is likely to be in the hundreds of thousands.

The UN was bringing hundreds of millions of dollars a year in aid to Sudan. But it wasn’t exactly welcome. The RSF wouldn’t let aid into El Fasher more than a month after taking the city. Grandi was briefed on one possible explanation: the happenings were so bloody that they required more than six weeks to clear up. Mobile phone networks in Darfur were cut off, but satellite images showed what appeared to be piles of bodies being burned. The Sudanese government also at times resisted aid being delivered to any area controlled by the paramilitaries, hoping to weaken the enemy. “This is so typical of civil wars. We had so much the same with Assad and Idlib,” said Grandi.

Sudanese officials were hindering access to those fleeing the RSF’s atrocities. Was this just the paranoia of an authoritarian state or something more? In 2009, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Bashir for alleged war crimes in Darfur. The former president has never been extradited and was last reported to be living in a military hospital north of Khartoum. But the potential for similar charges was unlikely to be forgotten by his successors. It’s not just what humanitarians will bring, it’s what they might see.

For aid workers like Grandi, to deal with governments is often to implicate oneself in tragedy. In Gaza, Palestinians could not flee the territory to safety, partly because Egypt had refused to open its border. Grandi could have pressured the Egyptians to change course. But he agreed with them that opening the border would have been to abet the ethnic cleansing of the territory in the long term: “This [would have been] worse than Bosnia: this was cleansing the whole Palestinian population . . . I never asked for the border to be opened.”

Grandi seemed at ease with these decisions. But he knew that in Sudan UNHCR greatly depended on the goodwill of the armed forces — themselves accused of using chemical weapons and bombing civilians.

When the high commissioner visits a refugee camp, his media team goes ahead first to select displaced people that he can talk to. The Al Afadh camp, north of Khartoum, houses the poorest of the poor — about 10,000 people who have fled atrocities committed in El Fasher. The journey of hundreds of miles has taken them days or even weeks. Thanks to extortion, it has often cost them most of their earthly possessions.

We, in contrast, glide up inside our air-conditioned SUVs. A refugee camp is an uncomfortably familiar place. I recognise the sand, the tents and the crowds from TV reports and charity appeals. I notice a boy with a T-shirt reading: “Believe in yourself. Nothing is impossible.”

The absences take longer to come into focus. Families sit on mats in the sun. They have no shade. There are no more tents available. Each day, they have been told that more tents are coming. Each day afterwards, they have been disappointed. We have been told that the camp has few men. I find myself sitting in a group of widows. Their husbands and sons were stopped as they left El Fasher. Some were shot dead. Tens of thousands of civilians are missing; some are described as being in RSF detention. Most are probably dead.

A common allegation is that the RSF call men’s families to demand ransoms. One woman says they demanded money to release her uncle. Once she had paid, they sent a video of him being killed. Another, Amal, pushes forward to show me her broken wrist. She used to sell vegetables and perfumes in the market at El Fasher; her husband was a day labourer. When their family escaped the city, the RSF tried to rape her two daughters. “My daughters said please save your lives and let them come to us.” She and her husband resisted. He was shot dead; she was beaten. Their house was destroyed. Two of their sons are dead. She describes how she struggles to get out of bed each day. “I was a big woman, now my health is not like before.”

Eventually, a UNHCR staff member leads me away. “If you want to hear their stories, you will be here seven days.” Grandi is keen to talk, but the authorities want to control the narrative. Two officials insist on accompanying him to the tents. Their translated exchange becomes heated. Why does he have to go to this tent, the officials ask. I’m the high commissioner, he replies. The authority of his office begins to wilt in the heat.

The stand-off ends in a messy compromise. Grandi ends up in a tent, accompanied by officials, meeting a woman who left El Fasher when eight months pregnant and who now has a 10-day old baby. The UN SUVs outside keep their engines running. Nearby, a cheerful 23-year-old woman is sitting on a mat, trying to follow an online lecture on her phone. Being displaced will not stop her from studying to be a nutritionist.

The trip upsets Grandi in a way that he welcomes. For his work, “anger is a necessary tool, a necessary element”. Until a few years ago, he felt his indignation was shared. “Nobody would dream to justify any of these abuses. Now, condemnation of the Russians destroying schools, or the RSF doing what we heard, or whatever, is ’Yeah, maybe, but . . . ’ There’s a lot of ’but’.”

Humanitarians see camps as a temporary fix. This one may be a safe haven, but it already contains the seeds of its own failure. It is 20km from the nearest town. If the displaced people want to work, or see a doctor, they have problems. UNHCR officials admit that there are not enough toilets. They would have brought international experts to design the layout of the camp, but money was short. Grandi assures a family he’s heard more tents will arrive the next day. When I check a few days later, the tents are still in transit. The reason is not clear.

Our convoy travels on, overtaking people on donkeys. Grandi meets with Sudanese politicians. He tells them the war has to stop, that his teams must have access. He is greeted with ceremony and, sometimes, gifts, although it is unclear whether his message is heeded. Officials try to stop him meeting refugees who have returned to Sudan from Egypt, citing dubious safety concerns. Such obstruction is “very rare” he says. “Tell them, I’m not afraid.” The meeting goes ahead. Grandi tells the returnees they are home. “Don’t be lazy. You have to find your way yourself.” He worries that aid and refugee camps in particular create dependency. Later, in the SUV, he reflects that these people had only been refugees for a short while: “They are not corrupted yet.”

Grandi has a fever, but his schedule is inflexible. He finds himself under a palm tree in a dark suit in 30C heat, listening to stories of south Sudanese refugees, stifling the occasional yawn. At the end, he rises to tell the refugees that money is sparse. He tells them not to join the war: “Unfortunately these things happen in every war. Please tell your people not to do these things.” The message is calibrated to win favour with the government officials watching.

These were the knots Grandi tried to unpick in his visits and in his calls. The Gulf states can in theory compensate for some of the west’s aid cuts. But their funding, said Grandi, “is erratic, it is unpredictable, and it is very often very politicised, very driven by specific purposes”. Gulf countries wanted to determine what their money was spent on. UNHCR wanted the flexibility to respond to emergencies and forgotten crises. It saw that as key to its impartiality.

The United Arab Emirates claims to be the “second largest donor” to the UN in Sudan (a claim UN data doesn’t seem to support), but it is also widely documented to have armed the RSF paramilitaries. At a UN donor meeting in December, representatives from the UAE and Sudan engaged in a shouting match: the Sudanese furious at the Emiratis’ cheek in posing as humanitarians, the UAE denying wrongdoing and saying the Sudanese made aid impossible. The compromise: the UAE donated $15mn to UNHCR, mostly to be spent on Sudanese refugees outside Sudan. The UAE also agreed to pay $550mn into a global humanitarian fund. The UN would maintain control of how it was spent. Sudan’s government, in effect, had to accept.

Humanitarians’ eternal dilemma is when to condemn abuses and when to stay silent in order to protect access to the needy. The Red Cross does not take sides; the UN is more nuanced. Hearing of the RSF’s atrocities from survivors of El Fasher had, in a grim way, made Grandi’s job easier: he could now go “full steam” in condemning them. But there was also a new risk: as the RSF advanced, civilians in other towns might flee faster. Then UNHCR’s lack of tents — its lack of capacity — would be further exposed.

Three weeks earlier, I’d watched Grandi deliver a speech on global solidarity at Westminster Abbey on the same day the UK Home Office announced a set of restrictive immigration measures. The most eye-catching of these was a plan (later disavowed) to seize asylum-seekers’ jewellery to help pay the costs of their accommodation. In front of a supportive audience, Grandi declined to pick a fight. But he insisted the principles of the Refugee Convention were “as valid today as they were in 1951”. “Do we want to go back to 1939?” he mused. “Asylum is among the finest gestures that humanity has to offer.”

The 1951 Refugee Convention, the international agreement by which countries agree to protect those fleeing persecution, is the UNHCR’s revered text. But it is not the document some might imagine. Originally, it did not create a global right of asylum, applying only to those displaced by events in Europe before 1951. Only later, in 1967, did a protocol extend its protections to the whole world. Even then, while the convention offered protection from targeted, Nazi-style “persecution”, the reality in many poor countries was more likely to be war and state failure. But if its principles have, in practice, often been double standards, now they are openly questioned.

The convention’s scope has been widened gradually by regional agreements and by lawyers. It doesn’t insist that refugees claim asylum in the first safe country that they reach. This has created a problem. Hundreds of millions of people live in fragile states. Their potential to travel has been aided by modern transport, mobile phones and smuggling gangs. Is the west obliged to accept them all? Is it not reasonable to seek limits?

Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, academics at Oxford university, have argued that the system is inadequate. Compassion must be clever, they argue. The right to asylum is not a right to move wherever you want. Refugees can be best assisted in the region they come from, where they are likely to find it easier to work and easier to return home. At the moment, the west pays billions to process claims and house the minority of asylum-seekers who make their way to its borders. One solution could be a grand bargain, wherein rich countries offer more aid and trade opportunities to troubled regions in return for taking fewer refugees themselves, and being able to return humanely those not recognised as refugees.

Grandi was sceptical about wholesale reform. In any case, he felt Europe could cope. About 41,500 people crossed the English Channel in small boats in 2025. “In one day, you can have 40,000 people [from Sudan] go to Chad. I think we have gone out of proportion with this polemic that is fuelled by the populists.” The west has taken millions of refugees from Ukraine, “without a leaf trembling, as we say in Italian”. The line wasn’t entirely convincing. The example of Ukraine is also an argument that solidarity works best when it is regional: European publics had accepted moral duties to Ukrainians that they would not to Syrians or Sudanese.

Didn’t Grandi fear that, unreformed, the convention will let the populists win? “Even if that were a risk, I would not be prepared to address it by eliminating the convention.” Migration is “the price you pay for being rich”.

In mid-November, Trump posted that, at the request of Saudi Arabia, he would seek to bring stability to Sudan, “the most violent place on Earth [but] a Great Civilization and Culture”. Here was something Grandi could cling to. “Of course, then you have his own vanity, you have the minerals, whatever, [but] peace is never a pure exercise, there’s always something around.” The hope was probably in vain: Denise Brown, the UN’s co-ordinator in Sudan, reflected that there was “no solution in sight”.

In the days Grandi was in Sudan, Trump’s White House published a National Security Strategy that didn’t even mention the UN. The president had announced a peace deal in the DR Congo, where the UN was again almost invisible. He unveiled a Board of Peace, which he said “might” replace the UN.

Barham Salih, a former president of Iraq and himself twice a refugee, had been named as Grandi’s successor. Salih’s pitch was that the high commissioner should come from the region with the greatest refugee crises. His appointment reflected, perhaps, that Europe’s claim to humanitarian leadership was fading — a politician would be needed to lead UNHCR out of its predicament.

Some aid experts saw Grandi’s tenure as a missed opportunity to process the lessons of the Syrian refugee crisis, to adjust UNHCR to a new era of western retreat. The reliance on US funding was unsustainable. “We’re not going to go back,” said Sara Pantuliano, chief executive of the Overseas Development Institute, a think-tank. Grandi is “a person of incredible integrity. But I don’t think I can say he’s done enough to make the organisation fit for the challenges of today.” One option has been a merger with the International Organization for Migration, a UN body historically more under the sway of the US. Another, to delegate more to local groups that can deliver aid more efficiently.

Decades of foreign postings consumed Grandi, who is single with no kids. “You have to make sacrifices. I don’t even like that word. You have to make choices.” I wondered if he now questioned his own choices. Afghanistan was back under Taliban rule; Gaza was in ruins. He chose to remember the good parts. When the Taliban fell, Afghan women employed by the UN returned to work. “I remember the lady who later became my secretary entering the office, taking this burka, literally tearing it away and throwing it to the other side of the room. I still have goosebumps. That was the spirit. And you were not imposing: they wanted that.

“I think it was Bush Jr who said the US will never do state-building again. What a strategic error!” The lack of a state capacity was “the root of all these problems that we see here”. His own lesson from Afghanistan was not that the west shouldn’t try but that the west shouldn’t waste an opportunity. “I think the international community is wasting the opportunity in Syria at the moment: too slow, too hesitant, too hand-wringing about ’Shall we help them or not?’ . . . You have to take some risks.”

In the final days of Grandi’s term, the US announced $2bn in humanitarian funding for the UN: a fraction of what it used to give, but still better than nothing. “They don’t want to be seen as non-humanitarian.” He had learnt long ago that to care is to compromise; often it is to clutch at whatever remains.