SUDAN: WFP Airdrops Food To New Displacees

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Feb 4 1998 (IPS) - Fresh fighting in southern Sudan has pushed yet another group of people from their homes, prompting the UN World Food Programme (WFP) to start rushing food to some 150,000 newly displaced persons.

In a statement made available to IPS on Wednesday, the WFP said the food was being airdropped to people in southern Sudan’s Bahr el Ghazal region who have fled the government-held towns of Wau, Gogrial and Aweil over the last few days as a result of the fighting.

“A C-130 Hercules aircraft which WFP has just started operating today (Feb 3) from its base in Lokichoggio, Kenya, will airdrop 32 tonnes of food (enough to feed 80,000 people for one day) to two locations where people have flocked,” it said. “This is the start of a daily airdrop operation.”

WFP says it has positioned 10 emergency officers in five key locations in Bahr el Ghazal, while another two persons were expected to be flown in on Feb 4.

The displacees are victims of a civil war that has been going on since May 1983 between the government and the southern-based rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) which is demanding greater autonomy from the mainly Arab-Muslim north. The conflict has reportedly claimed hundreds of thousands of lives and displaced more than 3 million Southerners, some of whom sought refuge in and around Khartoum, while others are in neighbouring countries.

“The recent fighting between the government of Sudan forces and the SPLA broke out very suddenly, and has prompted thousands of townspeople to abandon their homes with virtually no belongings — no food, no water, no clothing, and no shelter materials,” the WFP said in its statement.

It added that an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 civilians had fled in about four different directions in Bahr el Ghazal. “They are now living in the bush and in very small villages,” it said. “Most of the displaced are women and children.”

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

Before the new influx, the WFP says, it was already planning to give food aid to around 185,000 people in Bahr el Ghazal.

“This is because insecurity throughout the region last year meant that thousands of people have been unable to cultivate and therefore have had absolutely no harvest. 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 statement.

Earlier this week, the Nairobi-based UN Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), the main organisation which operates in the south of the country, said it lacked the resources to respond in a big way to the growing crisis in Bahr el Ghazal.

“We simply do not have the resources to meet the survival needs of this growing number of people,” OLS Coordinator, Carl Tinstman, said here.

The OLS was formed in 1988 soon after the death of some 300,000 Sudanese, mostly non-combatants, of famine-related diseases in the south of the country.

While the relief agencies reported movement away from the region’s main towns, reports from the Sudan said rural people were fleeing to Wau, Bahr el Ghazal’s capital and the second largest town in southern Sudan.

Sudanese Vice-President al Zebair Mohamed Salih was quoted as saying by Sudan’s state-owned Radio Omdurman, monitored here on Wednesday, that government forces had repulsed a rebel attack on the town and that “an air bridge to Wau is continuing at a daily rate of three or four flights”.

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

Last month relief workers in Wau told IPS that since December, between 100 and 150 people were arriving daily in Wau and Maryal Bai, about 50 kilometres northeast of Wau. Many of these were women and children, but some were rebel soldiers.

Salih said calm was now returning to Wau, following the “defeat” of the rebels.

SPLA Nairobi spokesman, John Luk, acknowledged this week that the airport and the military headquarters in Wau were under government control. But he said that Khartoum would not be able to send reinforcements by air because the airport is within the striking range of the SPLA artillery.

He also said that SPLA forces controlled part of the railway line which runs into Wau from the north.