Sudan consular emergency response: Canada’s role in the global effort to bring stranded foreign nationals to safety

After violence erupted in Khartoum, Sudan, on April 15, 2023, Canada quickly took on a leadership role, organizing discussions with like-minded countries to coordinate a response to the crisis. With the main airport closed and artillery fire and air strikes forcing residents to shelter in homes—many with no electricity and dwindling food and water—Global Affairs Canada (GAC) led daily video calls among its global partners. A number of countries organized military flights out of an air base north of the city, each carrying passengers of various nationalities. Among them were 462 Canadian citizens and permanent residents, who were flown out of Sudan to safety. On 6 flights from Khartoum, Canada evacuated 176 of these Canadians, permanent residents and their family members, as well as 360 foreign nationals from a dozen countries.

“This was a war zone,” says Sébastien Beaulieu, Director General for Security and Emergency Management Operations and Chief Security Officer at GAC. He chaired the calls among the partners, which included representatives of G7 countries, the European Union, Australia, New Zealand, Norway, the UN and the World Bank. This unprecedented international collaboration led to a global air bridge for thousands of people from around the world stranded in Sudan, says Beaulieu. “The mutual assistance was such that each country evacuated more foreign nationals than its own citizens.”

Early reports of violence in Khartoum

Reports of the fierce fighting that had broken out between the Sudanese Armed Forces and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group, were received early on the morning of Saturday, April 15, by GAC’s 24/7 Emergency Watch and Response Centre (EWRC). A team there keeps abreast of emergencies worldwide through various channels and collates reports coming from Canada’s 182 global missions.

“There was fighting all over Khartoum and shooting at the airport. Planes were on fire on the tarmac,” recalls Yannick Lamonde, who is responsible for the EWRC as director of Emergency Operations at GAC. There were eyewitness accounts from Philip Lupul, Canada’s then ambassador to Sudan, who noted that everyone had been caught off guard by the violence. Through instant messaging, he advised embassy staff to remain in their homes. “Then I sent off messages to Ottawa to say, ‘We have a situation here.’”

In collaboration with Beth Richardson, then director of GAC’s Eastern and Southern Africa Bilateral Relations division, which covers Sudan, Lamonde organized a coordination call on Sunday morning with various GAC divisions involved in the response to such incidents. On the next day’s call, participants heard from Lupul on the ground in Sudan. “He told us that things looked worse than the day before,” Lamonde remembers. Those calls expanded to become Interdepartmental Task Force meetings, with 150 participants from GAC and other departments, including those who are part of Canada’s footprint abroad. The meetings continued each morning for the next 3 weeks.

International ties prove critical

An emergency contact centre staffed by surge responders—GAC employees who sign up to work shifts around the clock, in addition to their regular jobs—was getting calls, emails and messages from Canadians “desperate to leave,” says Martine Brunet, Deputy Director of Emergency Operations. They were offered information about restaurants and pharmacies that were open and could deliver, tips that came from the staff of Canada’s embassy and of embassies of like-minded countries.

Beaulieu says problem-solving is necessary to manage such situations, and international ties are a crucial part of that. “You build relationships and networks and alliances to get to an outcome.” However, the lines of international cooperation had blurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. “If networks aren’t sustained through in-contact, in-person trust-building and relationship-building, you can’t rely on them,” he explains. In late 2022, Canada and its crisis-management counterparts—some 25 countries and international organizations—committed to reinvigorating those ties. Canada volunteered to host the parties in a Diplomatic Security Colloquium in May 2023.

Now, a month before that planned event was to happen, the emergency and security officials were reestablishing their contacts in daily 8 am video meetings, with Canada taking the lead, Beaulieu says. “Everybody was keen to hear and learn from each other and put issues on the table.” The partners shared information, from possible overland evacuation routes through Sudan to the location of military checkpoints dotted around Khartoum.

Local staff on the ground became an important source of what was happening in Khartoum, he says. “We’d ask, ‘Which flag is flying at the airport? What roads are open?’ That tactical information allowed us to make informed decisions.” Those high-level calls were accompanied by one-on-one chats, says Serge Koskinen, Director of Planning, Training and Exercises at GAC. “If people wanted to discuss further, we would have more in-depth conversations.”

Over the first days of the crisis, one of the key issues was how each country could get its diplomatic staff out of the country, the deteriorating security situation making it difficult to ensure their safety. When the United States arranged to extract its staff from its embassy compound outside of Khartoum by helicopter beginning on the night of Saturday, April 22, the Canadians joined them. Given the security situation in Khartoum, the Embassy of Canada in Sudan temporarily suspended its operations, with its staff instead working from Djibouti and other safe places to help respond to the crisis. They maintained communication with the Sudanese government, neighbouring countries and the international community to help Canadians still inside Sudan’s borders.

The air bridge begins

Figuring out a way to help their nationals leave Sudan was a major focus of the global partners. Lupul says one option considered for evacuations was to go by car to Port Sudan, a city on the Red Sea far to the northeast of Khartoum, and then travel by boat to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. A convoy of vehicles was organized; however, each of them needed to bring along enough fuel for the road trip, which would take some 30 hours. “It just wasn’t an option for most people.”

France, meanwhile, had negotiated with the Sudanese authorities to use Wadi Seidna Air Base (WSA), about 30 kilometers north of Khartoum, to evacuate French and other foreign nationals by plane. Countries started organizing flights to take part in the evacuations. This global cooperation was unique, particularly as each plane would carry a broad range of nationalities, Koskinen explains. “Every country has responsibility for its own people; there is no international agreement or institution that does that.”

It was tricky to time the flights, Brunet says, given checkpoints and people’s varying levels of comfort with moving through the city. That, combined with the expediency with which the aircraft arrived and departed, made collaboration among the countries a practical solution. Indeed, when the Canadian Air Force (CAF) joined the evacuation effort under Operation SAVANNE on April 27, the first C-130  Hercules aircraft that landed at WSA had been expected to pick up 60 Canadians and permanent residents for the trip to Djibouti, who would then fly by commercial charter to Nairobi, Kenya. But 50 of them had already left on a German military flight bound for Jordan and then Berlin. So that CAF plane took mostly citizens of other countries, says Brunet. “We just tried to get as many passengers on those flights as we could.” Beaulieu adds that “mission critical was not to get Canadians onto the Canadian plane to make it back to Canada, it was to get them out of Khartoum and to a safe location.” 

Behind-the-scenes negotiations

On the ground in Djibouti, Lupul and Stéphane Jobin, Canada’s then ambassador to Ethiopia, with responsibility for the African Union and Djibouti, had had their hands full. Lupul, for example, needed to obtain permission from Ali Al-Sadiq Ali, then Minister of Foreign Affairs of Sudan, for CAF to pick up evacuees at WSA. “It was happy news when we secured permission for our planes to go in,” he says. Jobin negotiated with authorities in Ethiopia so the CAF flights from Khartoum to Djibouti and charter flights to Nairobi could fly over Ethiopian airspace.

International ties also helped Canada secure space at Djibouti’s civilian airport, which connects to the military bases of several countries, including Japan. The first of the CAF flights had several Japanese people aboard, says Jobin, who spent 9 years on postings in Japan and was close to Japan’s then ambassador to Djibouti, Otsuka Umio. “The Japanese helped with the parking of the plane and hosted our passengers when there were long intervals to wait.”

Members of Jobin’s staff in Ethiopia had come to Djibouti to help with the evacuation operations. In consular crises, GAC also has a group of officers who can quickly travel to spots where extra resources are needed, called the Standing Rapid Deployment Team.  Member Kim O’Reilly saw the international cooperation at work, with the Djiboutians as “key players” in allowing countries like Canada to run their operations there.

Over a 3-day period, 6 CAF flights evacuated 536 people, one third of them from Canada and the rest from a dozen other countries. As each flight left Khartoum, “we’d alert the embassies or representatives of those countries in Djibouti to come to the airport and meet their citizens,” O’Reilly says. “Amongst friendly nations, there’s always a willingness to step up and provide a helping hand.” The 462 Canadian citizens and permanent residents who left Sudan were carried by the military aircraft of 10 countries, in addition to CAF. Additionally, some 20 Canadians travelled out of Sudan by land and 39 made their way by sea to Jeddah.

The international collaborations continue

The Khartoum air bridge helped to “sensitize everyone to the importance of global networks,” Beaulieu says. “It’s all about ensuring that we pool our insights and collectivize our response when we face a situation, whether it’s an evacuation, an insurgency or needing assistance for mission operations in a particular country.”

The Diplomatic Security Colloquium, held in Ottawa from May 8 to 10, 2023, covered topics from the countries’ recent experiences in Khartoum to plans to collaborate on emergency training for staff. “We’re telling our teams on the ground they should be talking on a regular basis about helping each other out,” Beaulieu says. For instance, “table-top” emergency planning exercises at diplomatic missions can include consular officers of like-minded countries. “It helps to know who else around town will be managing a crisis.”

Canada continued to chair international coordination efforts in crises following the one in Sudan, Beaulieu says. These included the response to a coup d’état in Niger in July 2023 and an earthquake in Morrocco in September 2023. “Our colleagues turned to us and said, ‘Well, you hosted Sudan, do you want to resume these calls?’” he adds. “We did, and off we went to coordinate. It is now a great new tool in our emergency management tool belt.”