The government of the United Kingdom(UK) has defended its decision to evacuate diplomats from Khartoum while offering only limited assistance to British citizens caught up in the fighting in Sudan.
“We will do everything we can, and I mean everything, to get our British citizens out,” UK Development Minister Andrew Mitchell told Sky News on Monday, adding that the government had a “specific duty of care to its own employees.”
“Our intention always has been to facilitate the exit of our own citizens as soon as it is safe to do so,” he said, without giving a timeframe.
Foreign Secretary James Cleverly’s warning that help would remain “severely limited” until a ceasefire is reached led to a flurry of complaints from British citizens in Sudan about being “abandoned” carried by media including the BBC.
Though the context is very different, the chaos has already begun to draw comparisons to the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, when thousands of people with the right to come to the UK were unable to get out.
Evacuation efforts have been hampered by intense fighting, including in Khartoum, that has limited access to major airports.
There’s no exact figure for the number of British passport holders in Sudan. Tobias Ellwood, the Conservative chairman of the House of Commons Defence Committee, told the BBC that more than 1,000 have registered with the foreign office while there are “easily a couple more thousand yet to do so.”
He warned that unless the government comes forward with a plan on Monday, people will start to take matters in their own hands.
Alicia Kearns, who heads Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, urged the government to communicate regularly with British nationals, after the BBC said they had spoken to one man who had received only two computer-generated text messages from the government telling him to stay indoors.
“That would suggest that no lessons have been learned since Afghanistan,” she told BBC radio on Monday.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak will be keen to avoid any repeat of the the UK’s chaotic withdrawal, which undermined his predecessor Boris Johnson’s government and led to months of recriminations. A civil servant whistleblower claimed the foreign ministry’s mishandling led to dozens of deaths, while reports of people left behind are still regularly front page news.
