Africa, Development & Aid, Headlines, Human Rights, North America, Population

SUDAN: Life no Better for World’s Most At-Risk People

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Jul 16 2004 (IPS) - The world’s worst humanitarian crisis, in western Sudan’s Darfur region, shows no sign of easing despite a number of high-profile delegations to the eastern African nation in recent weeks, says a senior aid worker who has just emerged from the area after four months.

"Globally it’s getting worse…all needs are not fully covered. People need more water, more sanitation, more shelter; you’ve got ongoing arrival of people," said Sophie Battas, programme coordinator in Darfur for Oxfam.

"You’ve got a scaled-up response from all agencies but it’s been insufficient and more is needed now," Battas told IPS in an interview Thursday. "Also, the rains are starting and that creates new concerns which have not existed. You have more sanitation problems in the camps where it’s overcrowded, with stagnant water which can create more mosquitoes and then a malaria epidemic."

Officials from the World Health Organisation (WHO) who visited the region this week also warned that serious threats remain despite recent efforts by a growing number of national and international agencies working in the area that until recently was virtually impossible to enter because of government intransigence.

Khartoum has been accused of backing Arab militias known as Janjaweed ("men on horseback") who are fighting two rebel forces of ethnic Africans based in Darfur, and according to many humanitarian and human rights organisations waging a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Fur, Masaalit and Zaghawa peoples.

More than one million Darfur residents have fled their homes with 200,000 crossing the border for refugee camps in neighbouring Chad in the past 15 months. It is estimated that 10,000 ethnic Africans have been killed in the process.

"The situation is still grim, death rates are still too high and we are concerned that as the rainy season approaches, this will have two effects," WHO’s head of emergency relief told journalists. "The first will be to increase the levels of disease, particularly diarrhoeal disease and malaria. And secondly, it will make the delivery of relief supplies more difficult because roads will be cut by swollen rivers."

Battas, who was based in both northern and southern Darfur, says the sheer scale of the humanitarian needs sets the area apart from other emergency situations she has worked in over the past year, including Colombia and Angola. "For example, in one camp that I worked in, in one week (in March) we had 30,000 people arriving. That’s something that’s quite impressive even if you’ve been working in many emergencies."

She said: "Now it’s a camp of 40,000 people. It’s like a town in the middle of the desert, but it’s a town of plastic sheeting."

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan is one of the senior international officials to visit the region in recent weeks. He signed an agreement with Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail on Jun. 3 that calls for Khartoum to disarm the militias, deploy 6,000 Sudanese soldiers and policemen to the area, facilitate humanitarian aid, and allow African Union (AU) troops and human rights monitors into Darfur.

The first meeting on implementing the agreement took place Thursday in Khartoum, attended by Annan’s new envoy to Darfur, Jan Pronk.

The meeting delayed discussion of a resolution at the U.N. Security Council that, among other things, calls for an arms embargo against the Janjaweed, according to the representative of one aid organisation working at the world body.

Previous talks have revealed a deep split among the 15 members of the Council, the U.N.’s top decision-making body, added the representative. While some nations oppose the U.S.-sponsored resolution because it does not offer Khartoum enough incentive to act, others contend it violates Sudan’s sovereignty.

Yet other nations want to toughen the proposed embargo to include all arms supplies into the country, according to the representative, who said it was possible Security Council experts and U.N. diplomats could meet on the issue Friday or Monday.

"It seems really quite hazy. And there’s no question that if what you wanted is for the council to be giving an unambiguous message about the progress it expects, and the measures it’s going to take if the Government of Sudan and the armed groups do not deliver on the commitments they made, we are a very very long way from that reality."

But, added the representative, "we don’t see what alternative there is to the recipe of tough international pressure on the parties to deliver on their obligations and provide urgent humanitarian assistance on the ground."

"Clearly the logic of that council, of what they have said in the past…is where governments show they are not willing to protect their civilians, they’ve actually either got to ask for help to do so, or to have help enforced upon them."

Alternatives is what Annan’s new special adviser for the prevention of genocide says he will be looking for in dealing with situations like Darfur.

"There’s an important U.N. presence in Sudan already but my sense, the more I look at it, is that preventing genocide in Sudan will take a sustained effort over a number of months and perhaps even years…On the other hand my challenge is going to be to add value to what the United Nations is already doing," said Juan Mendez, a lawyer and human rights expert who was named to the post earlier this week.

Possible action in such a situation could include "suggesting that we enter into some form of dialogue or negotiations with the actors on the ground, or with the government of Sudan; or involving other governments or involving decisions by the Security Council itself. A priori, I obviously cannot say what’s the best solution," Mendez added in a telephone interview from Oxford in Britain.

He acknowledged the importance of the international legal definition of genocide, but added that it is not the determining factor in acting against a possible humanitarian catastrophe. "In other words, it’s true that the definition triggers certain responses by the international community, but the worst thing we can do is use the definition to sit around and decide whether the definition has been triggered or not."