INTERVIEW-“Immoral” if Sudan aid cut due Asia quake-donor
By Alister Doyle
“OSLO, Jan 6 (Reuters) – Rich nations will be acting immorally if aid for victims of Asia’s tsunami is siphoned from cash meant to help Sudan recover from a 21-year civil war, the head of a donors’ group said on Thursday.
“I fear (aid) might be taken from Africa,” said Hilde Frafjord Johnson, who is co-chair of the Sudan donors’ group known as the IGAD partners’ forum and is also Norway’s minister of international development.
“If other poor people are supposed to pay the bills to help the needy people after this (tsunami) catastrophe it’s immoral,” she told Reuters.
She said aid pledged to help victims of the Dec. 26 tsunami that killed about 150,000 people from Indonesia to Somalia, should be be new money rather than raided from other parts of developed nations’ aid budgets.
Delegates from the Sudanese government and rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement will sign a deal on Sunday in Nairobi to end Africa’s longest-running civil war. Rebels in the mainly animist and Christian south have been fighting since 1983, when Khartoum tried to impose Islamic law on the country.
Frafjord Johnson said 2 million people had died in the war and 4 million had been forced from their homes since 1983.
And the southern peace accords do not cover the continuing conflict in Darfur, the region of western Sudan where more than a year of fighting has created what the United Nations calls one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Conflict in Darfur has left more than 1.6 million people homeless, killed tens of thousands and made hundreds of thousands dependent on food handouts.
“Almost 6 million people have been displaced,” Frafjord Johnson said of the twin conflicts.
She urged Britain, the chairman of the Group of Eight rich nations, to ensure pledges of aid to Sudan would be kept. “This is a critical message the UK can put forward,” she said.
Frafjord Johnson said donors would fix a date for a meeting in Oslo during the peace signing ceremony in Nairobi.