Annan urges rapid action on Darfur after ‘heart-wrenching’ visit

NYALA, Sudan, May 28 (AFP) — UN Secretary General Kofi Annan Saturday urged immediate action to end the Darfur crisis in Sudan after hearing accounts of destruction and abuse during a visit which he described as “heart-wrenching”.

UN SG Kofi Annan addresses the African Union meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia May 26, 2005. (Reuters).

On the second day of his tour of Sudan, Annan was confronted with the devastation caused by more than two years of fighting between ethnic minority rebels and government forces.

He kicked off his trip to the western Sudanese region with a visit to Kalma, Darfur’s largest camp for displaced people, where he listened to tribal leaders’ accounts of human rights violations.

Annan then went to Labado, a town which was largely destroyed in the fighting last year and where thousands of returned residents greeted him with desperate calls for relief and protection.

“Heart-wrenching,” Annan told reporters in Khartoum, upon returning from his whirlwind tour of Darfur.

“Obviously, everybody says it’s better than it was last year but this is not a situation that can be acceptable for long,” he said.

“We do not want to see a situation where they (the displaced) are in camps for years and years and years… So it is very urgent that we take the right steps and ensure we get them back to their villages.”

Kalma camp is bursting with an estimated 110,000 people, only a fraction of the more than two million who were displaced by more than two years of civil war and famine.

Suleiman Abu Bakr, speaking on behalf of the camp’s tribal leaders, told Annan there that 56 people had been killed in the camp since March and 580 women sexually assaulted in recent months.

He blamed the attacks on Sudanese police and the infamous Janjaweed, the pro-government Arab militias which the government has used as proxies in its scorched-earth campaign to crush the Darfur rebellion.

The head of the Sudan Liberation Movement, the main Darfur rebel group, told AFP that two civilians were killed in Kalma just before Annan’s visit on Friday and another two in Zamzam camp in North Darfur.

“The situation is going to worsen for the displaced when the rainy season starts,” said Abdelwahed Mohammed Ahmed Nur.

“We want the United Nations and the international community to take decisive action because there is a risk that four million people will die if nothing is done.”

The region is facing chronic food shortages because farmers have not been able to sow crops ahead of the rainy season amid ongoing violence in the western region.

Annan also got a taste of the task facing the Sudanese authorities and the international community if and when displaced Darfurians return to their homes after an elusive peace deal.

In the town of Labado, which has seen the recent return of about half of the 60,000 families who fled when government forces staged a massive anti-rebellion raid in December 2004, people are still fearing for their security and lack the bare minimum to survive.

“We are really still afraid of the Antonovs,” Nura Ahmed, a woman in her thirties living in a roofless mud hut, told the head of the world body.

As aid agencies still complain of limited access to the needy and insufficient international funding, the African Union peace mission in the region was also seeking to boost its security operation.

In Labado, Annan met the AU’s Nigerian commander, General Festus Okonkwo, who demanded more men and equipment.

The pan-African body announced Friday, after Annan warned that the world was running “a race against time” to solve the Darfur crisis, that it had received 292 million dollars in donations.

The AU wants more than 460 million dollars in cash, military equipment and logistical support to boost its current 2,700-strong truce monitoring operation to more than 7,700 by September.

The UN chief welcomed the AU donations but stressed that additional resources were needed to cover Darfur’s relief effort and the reconstruction of Sudan’s pacified South.

“We should not allow the peace agreement to get into trouble for a lack of money,” Annan said.

Before flying south, where an estimated 1.5 million people were killed in 21 years of civil war, Annan is due to meet Sudanese Vice President Ali Osman Taha and exert more pressure for a rapid solution to the Darfur crisis.

Annan said Friday he was hopeful that negotiations between rebels and Khartoum, set to resume in Nigeria’s capital on June 10, would yield a peace deal.

“I hope when they get there this time, they are going to stay there and negotiate in a sustained manner until they get an agreement,” he said.