Sudan: "How France led the evacuation of foreigners from Khartoum"

From The Economist's 1843 Magazine, May 3:

A presidential phone call and a secret C-130 landing helped build a corridor out of chaos

At 3am on April 24th, nine days into the street warfare that had rocked the Sudanese capital, Elizabeth Boughey was woken up by a colleague. A British schoolteacher at the American School of Khartoum, she had been forced to flee to a hotel in the centre of the city after civil war broke out on April 15th. “Bullets came through the walls of our apartment, through the glass,” Boughey told me later. She and her fellow teachers were looking in desperation for a way out of the country. The British and American governments had airlifted out diplomats the day before, leaving others to fend for themselves. Now, her colleague told her, the French were offering the teachers what seemed like a last chance of a safe passage out. But they would need to make a dangerous dash to the French embassy.

Boughey drove a carload of teachers down little-used side roads, avoiding the main drag of Africa Street. They hung a white T-shirt from the window and hoped not to encounter snipers. “You’re just driving across glass and bullet shells and huge power cables on the ground,” she said. Several times they were stopped by militiamen manning roadblocks. Usually the drive would have taken them ten minutes; this time it took a nerve-racking three-quarters of an hour. After nightfall the teachers boarded a convoy of buses which French military vehicles escorted to an airstrip. In the early hours of Tuesday, Boughey made it onto a French military plane bound for Djibouti. She told me about her escape a few days later, while sitting in a friend’s house in the north-east of England: “The French did everything.”

The French were offering the teachers what seemed like a last chance at safe passage out.
But they would need to make a dangerous dash to the French embassy

Boughey’s escape from Sudan was the culmination of a week of plotting by the French government to get foreigners out of the country – regardless of their nationality. Rwandans, Ugandans, Ethiopians and citizens of many other African countries, as well as Europeans and Americans, escaped with France’s help. The crucial early steps that France took – including taking control of the airstrip – enabled allies, including the British, Germans, Spanish and Turks, to conduct their own airlifts. The French led an extraordinarily effective evacuation effort at a time when other countries seemed to be scrambling. French officials spoke to The Economist’s 1843 magazine about the high-risk, secret operation, revealing the hour-by-hour details of how they did it.

The war began on April 15th when fighting broke out between two armies in Khartoum: government forces under Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) loyal to Muhammad Hamdan Dagalo (a warlord who is also known as Hemedti). By lunchtime that day, diplomats at the Quai d’Orsay, which houses the French foreign service on the left bank of the Seine, were meeting at the Crisis and Support Centre, a unit that deals with emergencies.

Conditions in Khartoum were deteriorating rapidly. Water and food supplies were running short. Power was down. The sound of gunfire and shelling echoed throughout the city; Hemedti’s paramilitary forces had burst into homes and hospitals and turned them into fortresses. By Monday April 17th President Emmanuel Macron started planning for a possible evacuation. The next day the French embassy began contacting French civilians in the city, urging them to head for one of three designated meeting points as soon as possible.

Late in the night on Tuesday April 18th, four military transport aircraft – three A400Ms and one C-130 – left France for Djibouti, where the French keep a permanent military base. Among those on board were French special forces, who would be first on the ground in the event of an evacuation. Once on the base, pilots and commandos pored over maps and satellite images of Khartoum, as well as intelligence reports.

In Paris, French military planners were working on two evacuation options to put to the president. One was an overland route to Port Sudan on the Red Sea, 800km (500 miles) away. That would require driving through treacherous territory held either by the RSF or the Sudanese armed forces. A Saudi convoy had made it out by road, but the planners favoured the other option: an airlift. Wadi Seidna military air base lies in the desert west of the river Nile, 25km north of central Khartoum, and is under Burhan’s control. Flying military transport aircraft into an airstrip so close to heavy fighting would entail plenty of risk. But if successful, it would be over quickly.... 

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