Darfur’s Perfect Storm

Heavy rain and continuing violence are threatening UN food aid to
Darfur just at the moment that refugees need it most

By Eric Reeves, The Guardian online

June 24, 2008 — UN humanitarian organisations operating in Darfur belatedly
acknowledged this week that conditions are poised to deteriorate rapidly
for some 4.3 million conflict-affected persons in the vast western
region of Sudan, which for five years has been the site of genocidal
counter-insurgency warfare. A “perfect storm” of threatening
developments is brewing, warned UN humanitarian coordinator Mike
McDonough on Sunday, and there can be little quarrelling with his grim
assessment. Most ominously, the UN’s World Food Programme reduced
daily food allowances for beneficiaries in Darfur by almost 50% at the
beginning of May. Now, the WFP and other UN agencies are warning that
“at least 2.7 million people will be affected by a reduction for at
least the next two months.” These next two months, unfortunately, are
in the middle of the rainy season, which largely coincides with the
traditional “hunger gap” between spring planting and fall harvest.
Malnutrition rates are rising even as heavy rains will soon turn much of
Darfur’s terrain into a sea of mud and a network of raging torrents,
making food deliveries to many locations impossible by ground
transport.

What prompted the WFP to cut rations to Darfur’s long-suffering
civilians? Unsurprisingly, given the region’s increasingly violent
character, the answer is insecurity, an issue that both UN and
nongovernmental humanitarian organisations have repeatedly raised in the
most urgent of terms. Food truck convoys, which must make the long trip
from Khartoum through Kordofan Province and into Darfur, face the
constant threat of hijacking. Drivers are beaten, robbed and too often
killed. According to the UN, this year alone there have been 160 vehicle
hijackings in Darfur, and eight humanitarian workers have been killed.

As a result, WFP drivers increasingly refuse to make the dangerous
trip, and only approximately half the required food tonnage is reaching
Darfur. The regime in Khartoum should of course provide military escorts
for these critical, though highly vulnerable, convoys. But the National
Islamic Front (National Congress party) comprises the very men
responsible for orchestrating the Darfur catastrophe. Although they have
mouthed various commitments about protecting food convoys, they have in
fact done nothing of significance. Militarily, the regime is still
responding to the ill-conceived attack on Omdurman, Khartoum’s twin
city, in early May by the Justice and Equality Movement rebel faction. A
proxy war against Chad, which has supported JEM, seems of considerably
greater urgency to Khartoum.

But massively reduced food deliveries, while critical, are only part of
a deteriorating humanitarian picture in Darfur. The fall harvests in
both North and South Darfur (three-quarters of the region’s
population) were disasters, and there is no evidence that this year will
be better, given the terrible insecurity in rural areas. Indeed, the UN
notes that 180,000 people were displaced from their homes in the first
five months of 2008. And yet camps are already over-crowded, and in many
the water tables are falling dangerously low. Both water and sanitation
services are overstretched, the UN agencies note, and “diseases such
as diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections in the forthcoming rainy
season will be more severe if people are weakened by a shortage of
food.” Khartoum bridles at public use of the word “cholera”, but
both cholera and dysentery epidemics loom threateningly if people resort
to drinking ground water.

Yet another problem is simply ignorance. Khartoum has compelled the UN
organisations to suppress their own malnutrition studies, as well as
those of nongovernmental organisations, thus making the most efficient
targeting of resources impossible. Last fall, the last time nutrition
studies were widely promulgated, malnutrition among children under five
was above emergency thresholds. The UN now asserts that malnutrition is
in line with what was observed last year at this time, but so much of
Darfur is inaccessible (approximately 60% at any given time) that it is
hard to know how to quantify the “spikes” in malnutrition reported.
And the very fact that Khartoum has suppressed 11 studies, and has
worked to limit the ability of humanitarians to gather new data bearing
on malnutrition, reveals all too much of the regime’s attitude toward
the people of Darfur and humanitarian efforts generally.

Shamefully, the UN organisations have been reduced to pleading,
declaring that the monitoring of malnutrition and sanitation “can only
succeed if aid agencies are able to undertake and release the results of
surveys and assessments in a timely manner and without restrictions.”
Without any tool or leverage to secure compliance, these organisations
can merely state that “the government of Sudan must urgently enact its
agreement to release the results of technically cleared humanitarian
surveys – including nutritional and crop surveys.” But unless a
four-year pattern of humanitarian obstruction is addressed meaningfully
by the UN security council, pleading is all that will be left to aid
workers.

Conscious of the impending rainy season, the UN organisations speak for
the broader “humanitarian community in Sudan,” which is “warning
that limited time remains to safeguard against an increasingly
precarious situation.” But time is decidedly not on the side of the
humanitarians. Recent regional weather forecasts predict that heavy
seasonal rains will soon reach Nyala, the capital of South Darfur and a
humanitarian hub. Much of the area affected by the rains, which
gradually move northwards, peaking in August and September, will soon be
impassable. The pre-positioning of food that has taken place in the past
as a response to transport challenges during the rainy season is
woefully inadequate this year.

How to improve humanitarian access? How to protect WFP convoys? How to
provide the minimum security that will allow aid workers to continue?
How to police the camps for displaced persons, which have become
tinder-boxes of rage, despair, and too often ethnic tensions? Some argue
that because there is no peace to keep, it makes no sense to have sent a
UN peace support operation to Darfur. And to be sure, the UN/African
Union “hybrid” mission for Darfur (Unamid), authorised by the UN
security council last July, has proved barely distinguishable from its
weak and ineffectual African Union predecessor. The shift to a UN
command at the beginning of this year has been followed by deployment of
only a few hundred additional personnel for a mission that was to have
included more than 6,000 civilian police and more than 19,000 troops,
all meeting UN standards for training and equipment. Altogether, only
about 9,000 troops and police have actually deployed, and Darfuris are
fast losing any confidence they may have had that this UN force would
make a difference.

Let us be very clear, however, about the consequences of refusing to
muster the international will and courage to make of the UN-authorised
mission a success: humanitarians will leave, food distribution will come
to a halt and massive starvation and disease-related deaths will occur
in the near term.

Glib declarations that there is “no peace to keep” in Darfur skirt
the true questions: Are we really prepared to see the world’s largest
humanitarian effort collapse amid insecurity? Are we really prepared to
accept the consequences of a precipitous end to international aid
operations in Darfur? Are we really prepared to countenance the
agonising deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians? There
are no more urgent questions in the world today.

* Eric Reeves is author of A Long Day’s Dying: Critical Moments in the Darfur Genocide. He can be reached at [email protected]. www.sudanreeves.org