UNICEF : Bandits hit vital aid convoys in Darfur

By Jeremy Lovell.

Aug 31, 2005 (London) — Fighting may have died down in Sudan’s crisis-torn Darfur region, but rampant banditry has taken its place and is hitting key humanitarian aid convoys, the UN said on Wednesday.

“There has been a tremendous rise in banditry. Not a single day goes by without two, three or four attacks on aid convoys,” Keith McKenzie, UNICEF’s representative in Darfur since 2004, told a new conference in London.

“You never know when you are going to be hit or where. They seem to be targeting the humanitarian community and workers. If anything, the situation there is more unstable,” he added.

Fighting between Arab militias and rebels in the western region has decreased in recent months but UNICEF, the United Nations’ children’s fund, said there were still more than three million refugees and conditions were dire.

Some two million of these were in more than 200 camps scattered around the region the size of France. The remainder were in isolated pockets and continuing to drift towards the already overfilled camps, putting them under intense pressure. “That is where the crisis is right now,” McKenzie said. “There is a tremendous need. That is where the priority lies.”

He said the bandits came from both rebel and pro-government militias — not the Sudanese Army — and were attacking aid convoys because they were soft targets.

“It is opportunistic. They see an aid convoy, hold it up and take everything there,” McKenzie said.

He said the 11,000 aid workers in Darfur were doing a superb job but warned the rising lawlessness was making some agencies consider reducing the size of their operations just when the need for their presence was growing.

Martin Bell, UNICEF’s ambassador for humanitarian emergencies and a former war correspondent and politician, said the international community had lost interest in Darfur since a January peace deal ended a separate north-south civil war in Sudan after more than 20 years.

Darfur rebels took up arms in 2003 accusing the government of discrimination and neglect. They say Khartoum responded by backing Arab militias to drive non-Arabs from their villages.

Bell praised the African Union ceasefire monitoring force — which he said needed more people as well as far more logistic and communications support — and urged the world to refocus on the crisis around new peace talks scheduled for Sept. 15.

“The prospect of half the population living in camps for the foreseeable future is simply not acceptable,” he told the news conference. “It will be tantamount to an African Gaza Strip.”