A major problem for Sudanese refugees has emerged in the tidal waves following the evacuation of embassy staff from the capital, Khartoum. This weekend, filmmaker Ahmad Mahmoud would have participated in the Malmö Arab Film Festival, but his passport is at the Swedish embassy – which is vacated and closed indefinitely.
– It is extremely irresponsible of the Swedish embassy, he says to TV4 Nyheterna.
Instead of networking with other filmmakers at the Malmö Arab Film Festival, a festival for Arab film, Ahmad Mahmoud is thus left in war-torn Khartoum where shootings and explosions follow each other. He describes the situation as very dangerous, and it is only a matter of time before he will have to leave the city.
– I will move towards a port city, because I cannot stay here. My wife does not intend to leave the country without me, it is frustrating, he says.
“No reason to keep our passports”
Since the military power struggle broke out in Sudan about two weeks ago, tens of thousands of Sudanese have tried to cross the borders to Egypt and Sudan.
However, escaping the country is an impossibility for Ahmad Mahmoud.
– It is extremely irresponsible of the Swedish embassy, and other European embassies, to withhold passports from Sudanese citizens who applied for Schengen visas before the war, he says.
At the same time, he understands that the Swedish embassy was forced to evacuate its staff, but there should have been a better way to take care of the problem, he believes.
– It also raises the question that we shouldn’t have been in this position to begin with – if they had allowed us to apply for a visa electronically. There is no reason to keep our passports for so long.
It is unclear how many passports are available at the embassy
It is currently unclear how many passports are left at the Swedish embassy in Khartoum.
The Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs is tight-lipped about the situation that has arisen, but writes in a comment to Dagens Nyheter that “the hope is that operations in Sudan will resume as soon as the security situation permits”.