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REFUGEE DAY: One Million Wasting Away

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Jun 18 2004 (IPS) - The United Nations Security Council discussed them this week, as did the powerful U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but the world’s arguably most at-risk refugees continue to starve waiting for help.

"The situation in Kas is typical," wrote journalist Stephanie Nolen from Sudan’s western Darfur region earlier this month. "Its population has been tripled with an estimated 40,000 refugees, who have occupied the schools and built little lean-tos in the open areas. Four thousand people have made their home in the compound beneath five huge water towers – the tanks have been empty for months."

"They came from the village of Qorolei, four days’ walk farther west. They fled after a raid in which at least a dozen people died," added Nolen, a reporter with Canada’s ‘Globe and Mail’ newspaper.

"But they found little to comfort them. There are no aid agencies here. They have no cover, no buckets, no blankets, no pots, no latrines. They have never had a visit from a mobile health clinic; in the slim shade of the water tanks lie dozens of children too weak to move, their dehydration so advanced they can no longer keep down even water."

"We left our homes because a civilian cannot live in the middle of a war," says their village headman Abu Zeid Adam, 46. "But we have come here to suffer."

Jun. 20 is United Nations World Refugee Day. About 75 percent of the planet’s roughly 12 million refugees and asylum-seekers are in the developing world. Sudan has the largest number of refugees within its own borders, according to Amnesty International.

And no refugees are at greater risk than Darfur’s dispossessed, who have fled to other parts of the country or crossed the country’s border into neighbouring Chad.

The ethnic African refugees, members of the Fur, Masaalit and Zaghawa tribes, are fleeing militias known as "janjaweed" ("men on horseback") – well-armed ethnic Arabs and fellow Muslims, who are accused of waging a government-backed campaign of ethnic cleansing.

The United Nations and other humanitarian bodies now estimate that more than one million Sudanese have been uprooted, and with the government in Khartoum showing few signs of seriously confronting the problem, and with planting season having come and gone, chances of the displaced farmers returning home in the coming months are slim, they say.

"Nowhere else in the world are so many lives at stake as in Darfur at the moment," said U.N. Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland this week, adding that as many as two million people displaced by the repression may need food aid and other supplies in coming months.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced a day later that he will soon visit Darfur.

But that was insufficient for Canada’s U.N. ambassador, Allan Rock, who said in a meeting Monday that the world body’s top decision-making organ, the Security Council, must "demonstrate greater resolve in addressing even sensitive and politically challenging situations."

In an interview Friday, Rock said that Egeland told him Thursday that the situation on the ground had improved.

"Three weeks ago the humanitarian workers couldn’t even get into Sudan because the Sudanese government was playing games with permits and visas. Well, those games have stopped – they’re playing other games now – but at least the humanitarian workers are able to get access with less difficulty than in the past. The main problem now seems to be getting enough food and enough equipment into place," Rock said.

"Nonetheless, the underlying problem of restoring their security so they can return safely to their lands, and stopping the attacks – those remain unresolved, and the Security Council is well placed to issue a strong statement with consequences if the government of Sudan does not provide an immediate response to its own citizens," added the ambassador, from New York.

However, the council is well positioned but unlikely to act, he admitted. "I’m not optimistic. I think we have to keep the pressure up because it’s one of the few things that we can do. But I must say that I don’t anticipate an early response from the Security Council."

Rock singled out one of the council’s five permanent members, China, along with non-permanent members Pakistan and Algeria, as countries that oppose intervention in Sudan because it would violate national sovereignty.

One expert argues that the United States, one of four other permanent council members, could increase pressure to pass a resolution condemning Sudan, but, "I think we’re saving most of our diplomatic equity at this point for Iraq … it’s understandable but unacceptable," says John Prendergast of the non-profit International Crisis Group (ICG).

Prendergast testified at the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday. Afterward, a number of senators approached him and indicated they would be pressing President George W. Bush to act, Prendergast told IPS from Washington.

"The Bush administration needs to make a choice: are they going to conduct their diplomacy, are they going to make their resources available to save hundreds of thousands of lives in Darfur, or are they just going to talk about it and blame other people?"

Secretary of State Colin Powell said last week that government lawyers were considering whether Washington should label the situation in Darfur "genocide", which would trigger responsibilities for the international community under the Geneva Conventions.

The U.S.-based activist body Africa Action on Tuesday launched an Internet petition urging Powell to take that strategic decision. But Prendergast says that debate is delaying important decisions. "All the focus has to be is that there are hundreds of thousands who would die, so therefore we have to act now."

Sudan’s government cannot be trusted to maintain access into the region, added Prendergast. "Khartoum turns the aid faucet on and off. It drips aid into the region and then shuts it off and then drips it again, so today Jan Egeland may say ‘we got 16 visas approved and they only took four days to clear customs for this latest consignment of medicine’."

"But then tomorrow what’s it going to be? There’s no clear policy on the part of the Khartoum government to open up access across the board, because they give with one hand and take away with the other."

More than two months ago, on Apr. 7, Annan suggested he would push for an armed intervention by international forces if humanitarian workers and human rights observers were not "given full access to the region, and to the victims, without further delay".

"If that is denied, the international community must be prepared to take swift and appropriate action," he said.