Sudan relief efforts could collapse within weeks – Egeland
April 20, 2006 (UNITED NATIONS) — The relief effort in Sudan’s Darfur region could collapse within weeks unless foreign donors contribute more cash and the Sudanese government lifts punishing restrictions on aid workers, the top U.N. humanitarian official said Thursday.
Jan Egeland told the U.N. Security Council that just 20 percent of relief work in Darfur has been funded this year. The international community has stopped pressuring Sudan’s government to cooperate with aid groups or ease attacks, and it acts with impunity.
“We simply cannot sustain this massive relief effort much longer,” Egeland told the Security Council. “The government has again been imposing restrictions that make our work a daily struggle and administrative nightmare. And funding is dwindling rapidly, as we had feared.”
A three-year conflict between Darfur’s rebels and the Arab-dominated central government has caused about 180,000 deaths — most from disease and hunger — and displaced 2 million people.
The situation there has only gotten worse in the two years since Egeland first briefed the council on the crisis there, said Egeland, the U.N. undersecretary for humanitarian affairs.
More than 200,000 people who need food to survive are not getting it, and 650,000 people are beyond the reach of aid workers, he said.
Sudan’s government kicked out the Norwegian Refugee Council and has delayed giving visas to other groups. Aid workers also face “a constant stream of threats and a climate of intimidation,” he said.
There have been reports of stolen World Food Program trucks ferrying Sudanese government troops, and fighters mounting machine guns on relief trucks that still bear the flags and stickers of their original owners, Egeland said.
The government barred Egeland himself from visiting Darfur and the Sudanese capital Khartoum when he went to the region earlier this month. Egeland said at the time he suspected the government did not want him to see what was happening there.
Only one country, Britain, has contributed more money for the Darfur crisis in 2006 than it did in 2005, Egeland said. Asked to estimate how much longer the relief effort could last, he said it was “a matter of weeks if not months,” and that the situation would be far worse by mid-June.
“I don’t think anyone wants, 10 years after Rwanda, to see a collapse in Darfur and it can still be averted,” Egeland said.
His comments echoed those made recently by the U.N. special adviser on prevention of genocide, who said nations still seem unwilling to commit the troops and money that would be needed to stop other mass slaughters of civilians despite repeated promises of “never again.”
Security Council ambassadors said they would keep discussing the Darfur crisis, but none diplomats emerged from the meeting with new promises of concrete action.
China’s Ambassador insisted that Beijing was doing its part, while Greece’s ambassador laughed when a reporter asked if his nation would contribute more money.
“It’s a collective decision, you have to be aware of that,” Ambassador Adamantios Vassilakis said. “We need some more time.”
Deputy U.S. Ambassador Jackie Sanders said the United States would push forward “on a number of fronts” and that contributing more money is always under discussion.
The United States has described the violence in Darfur as genocide, and last week, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called Thursday for speedy deployment of a U.N. peacekeeping force to Darfur.
The African Union agreed in principle to hand over the duties of a 7,000 strong AU force to the United Nations, but the efforts have stalled partly because Sudan opposes the move.
No western nations offered significant troop numbers for the new force. Egeland said African and Asian armies — traditionally the leading contributors to peacekeeping forces — must not be left to bear the burden.
“I think it’s a bad thing that western countries, including Europeans are not offering soldiers, peacekeepers, policemen, to Africa,” Egeland said. “Africa is the biggest drama of our time, nowhere else in the world are so many lives at stake as in Africa.”
(ST/AP)