Few changes in southern Sudan since one year – UN’s Pronk

Mar 09, 2006 (PARIS) — The people of southern Sudan have not experienced significant improvement to their daily lives in the year since a peace deal ended Africa’s longest-running civil war, the chief U.N. envoy to the region said Thursday.

Jan Pronk was speaking at a two-day World Bank conference that brought together representatives from Sudan’s national government and the regional government in the south.

They reviewed the effectiveness of hundreds of millions of dollars (euros) of aid that international donors poured into the country in 2005.

“For the people themselves in their daily lives, nothing has changed,” Pronk said.

The two sides signed a peace deal last year ending 21 years of civil war. But fighting continues in a separate conflict, in the western province of Darfur — and tensions between Sudan’s government and the international community over that conflict threatens to disrupt aid plans for the still-impoverished south.

While Pronk said that there had been some “good steps,” he emphasized that there was still violence in the south, and that no discernible progress had been made in providing southerners access to basic needs including education, health and clean water.

The World Bank, which oversees donor trust funds for Sudan, disbursed US$485 million (A407 million) in aid to the country in 2005.

“The issue for us here is to bridge the gap between peace and development,” Pronk said.

Pronk urged donors not to make continued aid to south Sudan — which he called “the poorest place in Africa” — contingent upon an end to the ongoing crisis in Darfur.

An estimated 300,000 people have died and some 2 million have been displaced since a 2003 revolt by rebels from Darfur’s ethnic African population. The Arab-dominated Sudanese government is alleged to have responded by unleashing Arab militias, who carried out sweeping atrocities against ethnic African villagers.

Pronk said that peace talks between the Darfur rebels and the Sudanese government have made “no progress whatsoever for several months.”

U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick insisted before the World Bank donor meeting: “We cannot consider the (North-South peace plan) without addressing the ongoing conflict in Darfur.”

Speaking with reporters during the conference, Zoellick reiterated that Darfur remained “in crisis,” and called for urgent action.

The United States has urged Sudan’s government to allow a large U.N. peacekeeping force replace the current African Union mission in Darfur.

Sudanese officials are opposed. Tens of thousands of people protested in Sudan’s capital, Khartoum, on Wednesday against plans to deploy U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur and demanded the expulsion of the top U.N. and U.S. envoys.

“We urged the people in Khartoum to recognize that making the U.N. a point of conflict will be self-destructive for them,” Zoellick said.

Zoellick said a future U.N. contingent could build on the 7,000-strong African Union force already on the ground in Darfur. Troops from African countries and possibly India and Pakistan could make up the rest of the force, he said.

He warned that it could take several months to get a U.N. peacekeeping force together, adding that the international community had “no time to waste.”

“Millions of people are at risk here,” he said.

(ST/AP)