UN workers: Sudanese soldiers blocking aid to Darfur camp
DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
CAIRO, Aug 15, 2004 (AP) — Sudanese soldiers were preventing aid from reaching about 90,000 displaced people in a camp in Darfur after a mob killing in the settlement, U.N. aid workers and a rebel spokesman said Sunday.
Sudanese Deputy Information Minister Abdel Dafe Khattib, though, said aid was still reaching Kalma, a camp east of the South Darfur capital of Nyala.
Word of an aid blockade may spark new international condemnation of the Sudanese government over the humanitarian crisis in Darfur. At the end of June, the U.N. Security Council gave the Sudanese government 30 days to disarm Arab militias it is accused of backing in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Darfur’s African population. If the government doesn’t comply with U.N. demands, it could face economic and diplomatic penalties.
The government has vowed to bring the violence in Darfur under control and blamed it on rebel groups there.
Jennifer Abrahamson, a spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, said government troops blockaded the gates to Kalma on Friday after its inhabitants killed an alleged member of the Janjaweed, as the Arab militias are known.
“A high-level U.N. official is going to travel to Nyala next week to assess the situation and negotiate with the government to end the blockade as soon as possible,” Abrahamson told the Associated Press by phone from Khartoum.
A spokesman for the World Food Program, which distributes food in Kalma, said his U.N. agency believes the soldiers “turned back at least one aid vehicle today that tried to visit the camp.”
The aid vehicle belonged to Doctors Without Borders, whose Dutch affiliate runs a clinic and feeding center in the camp, WFP’s Peter Smerdon told the Associated Press in a call from Nairobi.
The camp is one of more than 150 erected in Darfur and neighboring Chad to house the more than one million people who have been forced to flee their homes since the conflict began in Darfur in February 2003. Then two African groups rebelled against the Khartoum government. International human rights organization accuse the government of trying to put down the rebellion by backing a devastating campaign by Janjaweed militiamen as well as sending in its own soldiers.
Adam Ali Shogar, a coordinator for one rebel group, the Sudan Liberation Army, told the AP Sunday that troops and Janjaweed were keeping aid, water and medicine from Kalma camp.
“We are calling on the international community to intervene in this case because the situation is going to worsen. Children are dying from disease, lack of water and lack of medical care,” Shogar said in a call from Chad.
WFP’s Smerdon, who estimated the camp’s population at about 90,000, said the camp has wells and that its clinics run by Doctors Without Borders and Doctors of the World “should have supplies for some time.” He also said WFP had delivered a month’s worth of food in mid-July, “so camp residents should still have some food.”
Both Smerdon and Abrahamson said they hadn’t heard of Janjaweed taking part in the blockade.
Shogar, the rebel spokesman, also said security forces had detained 21 people in the camp. Khattib, the deputy information minister, said he hadn’t heard of detentions.
A Sudanese Arab was beaten to death by a crowd of Africans in Kalma on Friday, the official Sudan News Agency reported. Madbou Ahmed Abdul Rahman and 16 others had been taken to the camp for a health training program by the aid organization CARE International. CARE staff tried to protect the trainees, but the mob stormed their offices and killed Rahman. The others managed to flee.
Abrahamson didn’t name Rahman, but said displaced people in the camp identified the dead man as one of “the people who participated in attacks on their families.”