US blasts Sudan over ‘useless’ Darfur travel passes for aid workers
WASHINGTON, May 17, 2004 (AFP) — The United States denounced the Sudanese government for issuing US relief workers with “useless” travel permits for the strife-torn region of Darfur that effectively prevent them from leaving Khartoum.
The State Department said 11 members of a US disaster response team now in the capital had been granted three-day passes to visit Darfur after intense pressure from Washington but noted that the gesture was hollow because the Sudanese government requires 72 hours advance notice before traveling.
“It’s Orwellian,” a senior State Department official said of the move after deputy spokesman Adam Ereli outlined the situation to reporters and suggested the incident was another example of Sudan hindering humanitarian access to Darfur.
“The 11 people in Khartoum did receive travel permits, however, the permits are only valid for three days and the government of Sudan requires 72 hours notice to travel, so that sort of renders the permits useless by the time they are received,” Ereli said.
“By the time you travel, your permit’s no longer valid,” he said with obvious exasperation.
“What we’re doing now is requesting longer permits for the team so that giving the permits will actually permit them to travel to Darfur. This is really, I guess, more of the same, making it difficult for humanitarian workers to do their job and it’s disappointing.
“There are people suffering in Darfur. It’s urgent that humanitarian workers be allowed to go there.”
Sudanese authorities in Khartoum handed the passes to the US relief team Saturday but demurred when confronted by the convergence of their expiry date and the advance notice requirement, the State Department official said.
“They gave us the permits on Saturday and said: ‘Now you can give us your 72 hours notice to go.’ Our guys looked at them and said: ‘That means we can’t use them,’ and they said: ‘That’s not our problem’,” the official explained.
The conflict in Darfur has uprooted a million people from their homes, according to UN figures, and driven 100,000 civilians to seek shelter across the border in impoverished Chad since it broke out in February 2003.
On May 7, the United Nations described Darfur as a region gripped by a “reign of terror”, where pro-government forces are committing massive human rights violations that may amount to crimes against humanity.
The fighting pits the SLM and the smaller Movement for Justice and Equality against government soldiers and armed Arab militias, the Janjawid, the primary targets of accusations of massacring the black, non-Arab peoples of Darfur.