HUMAN RIGHTS: Sudanese at Risk Following Ban on Relief Flights

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Feb 11 1998 (IPS) - More than 100,000 people are at risk in southern Sudan following a ban imposed by the Sudanese government on relief flights to the area where they have sought refuge from recent fighting, according to humanitarian agencies.

“The move is affecting all the U.N. agencies operating in the south,” Brenda Barton of the UN World Food Programme (WFP) said here. However, she told IPS on Wednesday that efforts were being made to bring about the resumption of air operations to southern Sudan.

While Sudan’s Planning Minister, Mohamed Osman al Khalifa told journalists Tuesday in Khartoum that the government did not plan to terminate the entire relief operation and that the ban would be lifted “soon”, relief officials feel any delay exposes more and more people to starvation.

The ban was reported by Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), a UN backed programme set up to coordinate emergency assistance for the war-torn south of the country, in a statement made available to IPS on Tuesday.

“As of 4 February, the Government of Sudan has denied humanitarian agencies access to recently displaced populations by suspending all flights into the Bahr el Ghazal region of southern Sudan,” said the OLS, adding that the flight suspensions were putting the lives of vulnerable people — mainly women and children — at risk.

“The people displaced have been walking for several days without food and with little water and are exhausted,” it said. “The Operation Lifeline Sudan is collecting emergency supplies and has positioned them in Lokichokio, ready to be flown to the areas where the displaced have been gathering. However, OLS cannot reach the people without flight clearances from the government.”

Lokichokio, a Kenyan town on the border with the Sudan, is the nerve centre for relief aid to the Northeast African country.

OLS was formed in 1988 to avert a catastrophe similar to one that occurred the year before in which up to 300,000 people, mostly non-combatants, died of famine-related diseases in southern Sudan.

OLS said the flight ban covers half the population of southern Sudan and has a serious impact, not only on the war-affected population, but also on hundreds of thousands of other women and children living in Bahr el Ghazal. The region, one of the most deprived areas in Sudan, was already experiencing a severe food deficit before the current crisis.

“With little or no medicines on the ground, wounded civilians caught in the conflict have no chance of receiving medical care. Cases of diarrhoeal diseases are already reported among children on the move,” said the OLS. “The displaced are reported to be weak, hungry and in urgent need of assistance in the form of food, medicines and shelter materials.”

The displaced — mainly women and children — were reported to be fleeing fighting in and around the towns of Wau, Aweil and Gogrial between the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) and government forces.

Sudan’s government banned the flights one day after the WFP announced that it had started an urgent airdrop of food to some 150,000 newly-displaced people in Bahr el Ghazal.

It said it was operating from its base in Lokichokio, Kenya, to ferry 32 tonnes of food (enough to feed 80,000 people one day) to two locations where people have flocked.

Bahr el Ghazal has been plagued by war and drought over the last few years. The WFP estimates that in 1998, a total of 300,000 people there will once again need significant amounts of food aid in order to survive.

According to the WFP, it had already been planning to give food aid to some 185,000 people in Bahr el Ghazal before fighting last month forced the latest wave of displacees from their homes, since insecurity prevented them from farming throughout last year, so they harvested nothing.

“As a result, many people in Bahr el Ghazal were already hungry, long before the traditional hunger gap season sets in (May/June),” said the WFP.

The OLS says an OLS emergency response team has already been established in Lokichokio, with representatives from the UN Children’s Fund (Unicef), the WFP, Save the Children (UK), Medecine Sans Frontieres (MSF-Belgium), World Vision International, Oxfam-UK and the Red Cross.

“Food, medicines and shelter materials were flown to the area prior to the flight suspensions, but much more is reported by OLS assessment teams on the ground to be needed to avert a potential humanitarian tragedy,” it said.

World Vision’s relief director for Sudan, Bruce Menser, said on Tuesday that: “Innocent children and women will starve because a government which claims right over them is denying them the right to live.”

Meanwhile, an air bridge to Wau — the capital of Bahr el Ghazal and the second largest town in the south — is continuing at a daily rate of three or four flights from the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, aid workers said here on Wednesday.

The air bridge was set up in mid-January to bring food, medicine and clothing to hundreds of thousands of civilians and militiamen who reportedly defected from the SPLA in the Bahr el Ghazal region.