UN’s Annan regaled with Darfur camp horror stories

KALMA CAMP, Sudan, May 28 (AFP) — UN Secretary General Kofi Annan was plunged into the chaos of war-torn Darfur Saturday when he was greeted in a western Sudan refugee camp by accounts of rape and murder and civilians venting their anger at Khartoum.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan (L) speaks to Sudanese refugee women at the Zamzam camp in northern Darfur, July 1, 2004. (Reuters) .

Annan, who flew to Nyala in South Darfur on the second day of his visit to Sudan, went to the nearby camp of Kalma, which hosts an estimated 110,000 Darfurians displaced by two years of civil war.

“Down, down with the government,” chanted angry civilians as Annan toured the over-populated dusty camp, one of the largest in the world for displaced people.

They complained of abuses by the Sudanese authorities inside the sprawling camp and demanded to be resettled in another country.

Annan then met with tribal leaders in the camp, who charged that the Sudanese authorities and their infamous Janjaweed proxy militia were continuing to perpetrate crimes against displaced civilians.

“Since March 1, 56 people were killed in the camp by Janjaweed and policemen. The latest incident happened as recently as yesterday, when two people were shot,” said Suleiman Abu Bakr, who spoke in the name of all tribal leaders.

He also claimed that a total of 172 people had been injured over the same period and 580 women raped in recent months.

International aid agencies could not confirm the exact numbers but have abundantly documented cases of abuse and killings against displaced people in Darfur.

The tribal leader alleged that a 10-year-old girl was raped and her family then given 200 Sudanese dollars — or less than one US dollar — as compensation by the offenders.

“I want the secretary general to guarantee that I will not be arrested for reporting this,” Abu Bakr said during the meeting.

After being consulted by Annan, the accompanying Sudanese State Minister for Humanitarian Affairs, Mohammed Yusef Abdallah gave his word no-one would be detained over the allegations.

“This is totally not acceptable and we will work with the authorities to make sure the IDPs (internally displaced people) are protected,” Annan said, visiting the camp for the first time in a year.

Humanitarian workers acknowledged that security even inside the camp remained a problem and stressed the need to beef up the presence of African Union troops.

“When the AU is present, security improves,” said a joint statement by several aid agencies read out to Annan during a briefing in the compound of a Norwegian NGO.

The pan-African body announced Friday, after Annan warned that the world was running “a race against time” to solve the Darfur crisis, that it had received pledges of almost 292 million dollars from donors following a crisis meeting in Addis Ababa.

The AU wants more than 460 million dollars in cash, military equipment and logistical support to boost its current 2,700-strong truce monitoring operation to more than 7,700 by September.

More than two years of fighting and of one of the worst humanitarian crisis in the world have left some 300,000 people dead and more than two million displaced.

Thousands of aid workers are deployed in Darfur, a semi-arid region the size of France, but the lack of a political breakthrough between the belligerents has hampered humanitarian relief.

After his talks with Sudanese officials in Khartoum on Friday, Annan acknowledged efforts by Khartoum to work for a solution and voiced his hope that negotiations due to resume next month in Nigeria would finally yield a peace agreement.

Yet the situation remains tense on the ground and tribal leaders also reported how the government’s aid commission office was torched by angry displaced civilians earlier this month at Kalma camp.

“This was a revolution because of what the police are doing here,” Abu Bakr said.