Sudan becoming dangerous for aid workers: UN
Dec 12, 2005 (LISBON) — Sudan is becoming increasingly more dangerous for aid workers because of the mounting violence in the African country, the United Nation’s refugee chief said Monday.
“The situation is one of total insecurity where humanitarian workers are risking their lives,” said Antonio Guterres, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in an interview with Lisbon-based Radio Renascenca.
“There are members of our team who can’t leave the areas where they are, unless it is by helicopter, to work in the camps because the roads are considered to be totally unsafe,” the former Portuguese prime minister added.
Guterres said there had been cases where security forces in the country belonging to the African Union had been kidnapped by armed groups in Sudan.
The African Union, which has a 6,000-strong peacekeeping force in the western region of Darfur, carries out patrols of camps for internally displaced people in Sudan.
Last month militiamen entered a camp in Darfur and fired on civilians, killing two children.
War broke out in Darfur in 2003 when rebel groups began fighting what they say is the political and economic marginalisation of the region’s black African tribes by the Arab-led regime in Khartoum.
As many as 300,000 people have died and more than two million fled their homes in what UN aid agencies have dubbed the world’s worst humanitarian crisis with reports of rapes, extrajudicial killings and other atrocities rampant.
(AFP/ST)