Armed men in Darfur attack aid convoy, beat staff
Sept 3, 2005 (Khartoum) — Armed men attacked and robbed an aid convoy travelling in western Darfurand threatened to kill aid workers if they used the same route again, a senior official with one of the aid groups involved said on Saturday.
The incident on Thursday in the Masteri area, southwest of of El Geneina, was the most serious in a recent spate of attacks against aid vehicles in Sudan’s Darfur region, where rebel groups are fighting the government.
“They (armed men) severely beat the people travelling in the convoy — there were some broken limbs. … They cleaned out the cars. They took phones, money, radios, everything,” the official told Reuters.
“They threatened to kill the people in the convoy if they saw them travelling on the same road again,” the official added.
The convoy included seven vehicles and 22 foreign and Sudanese staff members. Women in the group were stripped of their clothes and beaten.
“If this keeps up, we will have deaths,” said the official, adding that his organisation was suspending operations for a month and staff would remain within the confines of Geneina, the capital of West Darfur, until the group assesses the situation.
The official said it was not possible to accurately determine whether the armed men were operating alone or were connected to pro-government or rebel forces in the area.
Rampant banditry has hit aid operations in Sudan’s Darfur region where around 3 million people rely on aid for survival, aid officials have said.
Darfur rebels took up arms in early 2003 accusing the government of discrimination and neglect. They say Khartoum responded by backing Arab militias to drive non-Arabs from their villages.
A senior United Nations official working in Darfur said banditry in several areas across Darfur had become the most serious security concern in the region the size of France.
“It is just a matter of good fortune that there have not yet been any deaths,” Niels Scott, head of the Darfur unit for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told Reuters.
Reuters/ST.