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RI citizens safely evacuated from Khartoum amid shaky ceasefire
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People fleeing street battles between the forces of two rival Sudanese generals are transported on the back of a truck in the southern part of Khartoum, on April 21. (AFP/-)
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ndonesia has safely evacuated or accounted for the 937 of its citizens known to have been in Khartoum at the start of Sudan’s ongoing armed conflict, the Foreign Ministry said on Wednesday, noting that no Indonesian fatalities had been recorded.
The first group of evacuees, consisting of 557 people, arrived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, by sea on Wednesday morning. They are to be repatriated to Indonesia in batches.
In the second round of evacuation, which took place on the same day, a team led by the Indonesian embassy safely moved 328 citizens, mostly university students, from Khartoum to a safe zone in Port Sudan by road. Jakarta said the evacuees would wait in Port Sudan until they could be transported to Jeddah either by sea or on military aircraft.
In total, the Foreign Ministry noted, 897 of the 937 citizens residing in Sudan had been evacuated. Fifteen of the remaining group had left Sudan on their own, and the 25 others had declined to leave for family reasons.
“I would like to thank the Sudanese authorities, who have helped in the evacuation process, [as well as] the Saudi government for its facilitation,” Foreign Minister Retno LP Marsudi said on Wednesday.
The ministry had previously said that more than 1,200 Indonesian nationals were registered with the embassy in Khartoum as residents of Sudan, but Retno later noted that only 937 were in the country at the start of the conflict, as some citizens had returned to Indonesia for Idul Fitri or were in Saudi Arabia for umrah (minor haj).
Read also: 542 Indonesians evacuated from conflict-ridden Sudan
