World is failing Darfur: UN humanitarian chief
April 7, 2006 (NAIROBI) — The international community is failing in its responsibility to protect millions of people in Sudan’s troubled western Darfur region, UN emergency relief coordinator Jan Egeland said Friday.
Speaking just days after Khartoum refused to allow him to visit Darfur and denied him overflight rights to see refugees housed in camps in neighboring Chad, Egeland said the world was abandoning a people in desperate need.
“The world is failing Darfur on two fronts,” he told reporters at a news conference in the Kenyan capital where he launched a UN appeal for hundreds of millions of dollars to help drought afflicted east Africa.
“The world is not providing sufficient pressure on the political parties to make a peaceful solution to this and the world is not providing security,” said Egeland, an outspoken proponent of the deployment of UN peacekeepers in Darfur.
“I am very much concerned with the situation in Darfur,” he said. “The next few months will be critical in the internationally backed attempts to provide security for a civilian population that has no security.”
Egeland said relief agencies, including UN organizations, had sufficient supplies for those in need in Darfur but that humanitarian relief was useless if the intended recipients were dead or inaccessible due to insecurity.
“We have enough to keep people alive, but we can’t at all change their totally inhuman kind of situation in camps where they cannot live without being attacked,” said Egeland, who serves as UN under-secretary general for humanitarian affairs.
“We have no security for our work, we have witnessed massive attacks against civilian population, we have a local government throwing out humanitarian workers as we speak and we have little funding this year,” he said.
The conflict in Darfur erupted in February 2003 when rebels from minority tribes rose up against the central government in Khartoum, prompting a heavy-handed crackdown by troops and proxy militia called Janjaweed.
The fighting has left up to an estimated 300,000 people dead and displaced more than two million, hundreds of thousands of them camped in Chad.
Egeland said earlier this week that some 200,000 people had been displaced by fighting just in the past three months.
The conflict has continued despite ongoing peace talks between the warring parties in Nigeria and recent attempts to replace an African Union peace mission with UN peacekeepers have been rejected by Khartoum.
(ST/AFP)