245 French nationals and foreigners recently evacuated from Sudan landed this Wednesday morning at Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle airport in a plane chartered by the French authorities. A member of the French Embassy in Sudan told BFMTV of his “gratitude” to the French authorities for this operation.
The result is “improbable”. A plane carrying 245 people evacuated from Sudan landed this Wednesday morning at Roissy Charles-de-Gaulle airport, near Paris. Among the passengers, welcomed by French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna, were 195 French people, but also Dutch, Italians, New Zealanders and Sudanese, detailed the Quai d’Orsay.
Evacuation operations began over the weekend, ten days of fighting between the army and paramilitary forces. France has organized air rotations between the capital and Djibouti.
They were made possible in particular by passages negotiated with General Abdel Fattah al-Burhane, de facto leader of Sudan, and his deputy who became a rival, General Hemetti, who commands the paramilitaries of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF).
An “extremely complicated” operation
On BFMTV this Wednesday, the head of cooperation at the French embassy in Sudan, Franck Haaser, said he was “grateful that the French authorities set up this operation which was extremely complicated”.
“We had a week of chaos and we can only be satisfied, it was unlikely that there were no deaths,” he added.
A French soldier was injured during a reconnaissance mission between the aerodrome and the regrouping points of nationals, explained the staff of the armies to AFP. Emmanuel Macron, who spoke on Tuesday at the start of a defense and national security council at the Élysée, gave “reassuring news” from this soldier whose “life is no longer in danger”.
209 French evacuees
This Wednesday, Franck Haaser said he was “very happy that it ended like this”, after weeks when “the whole embassy team was mobilized” and “literally worked day and night”.
On Tuesday, France had evacuated 538 people, including 209 French, from Sudan, Emmanuel Macron announced. According to figures from the Sudanese Ministry of Health forwarded to the UNthe fighting had killed 459 people on Monday and injured more than 4,000 since their start.
The country entered the second day of a ceasefire concluded under the aegis of the United States on Wednesday, which was “partially maintained” on Tuesday evening, asserted before the Security Council the head of the UN mission in Sudan, Volker Perthes.
