Инстаграм Анджелина Джоли (Angelina Jolie)

This morning the UN General Assembly met to discuss the cost of inaction and urgent need to collectively scale up the humanitarian response in Sudan and the region. I recently returned from Chad, where I met Sudanese refugees who have escaped across the border. Due to relentless war and violence, Sudan is currently experiencing the largest displacement crisis in the world, with over 10 million people internally displaced and more than 2 million fleeing to neighbouring countries. The situation is also compounded by mass starvation, as approximately 25.6 million people—over half the population—are facing acute hunger. Despite being one of the poorest countries globally, the people of Chad are sharing their land, food, water, and healthcare with nearly 1.4 million Sudanese refugees. Volunteers in Chad and Sudan have established communal kitchens, collective shelters, makeshift clinics, and women’s cooperatives. They have distributed medication and organized education programs. The efforts of these local grassroots organizations have been nothing short of inspiring —they have achieved so much with so little. But they cannot meet the overwhelming scale of this crisis without proper international support and funding. And above all an immediate end to the fighting, to stop further loss of life, displacement, and suffering. My hope is that today’s meeting will result in decisions, not just conversation. Every hour matters as lives are at stake.

More people have been forced from their homes by conflict and oppression – 114 million – than at any other time on record.Forcibly displaced people themselves are leading the way in advocating for their rights.Stay informed, speak out for displaced people, and share this post.Photos by Getty Images and Refugees International.

ELECTRIC BIRD

In 2005, Abdulrazak Gurnah published “Desertion,” an epic novel about how the legacy of colonialism affected generations of African and British families in Zanzibar. Just a handful of years later, Gurnah became the first African writer in more than a decade to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature. On the occasion of the republication of “Desertion” and two other landmark works (“Afterlives” and “By the Sea”) I spoke to him about why the movement of refugees and migrants from the global south to the global north today cannot be separated from the injustice of colonialism. @time #time100 #AbdulrazakGurnah