UN humanitarian chief heading to Darfur with appeal for money

May 3, 2006 (UNITED NATIONS) — The U.N. humanitarian chief, who was recently barred from visiting Darfur, said he is heading to Sudan this weekend to spotlight the desperate need for money to help 3 million people and combat escalating insecurity in conflict-wracked Darfur.

“I feel it’s now on the brink,” Egeland said Wednesday in a bleak assessment of the worsening situation in Darfur. “We have a level of insecurity which is totally unsustainable. It could get much worse.”

That’s why it’s so important that the government and rebels agree on a peace deal to end the three-year conflict at talks being mediated by the African Union in Abuja, Nigeria, he said. Senior U.S. and British diplomats are now helping with the negotiations, and several African leaders are expected to join the talks on Thursday to try to get an agreement.

“If there was no agreement in Abuja, it could get much worse, and we are unarmed humanitarian workers, so we cannot sustain it if we are attacked,” Egeland warned in an interview.

Egeland, the U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, was to visit Khartoum and Darfur in early April when the Sudanese government, which had given him a visa, suddenly refused landing permission for his plane.

Sudan told him that visitng the Muslim areas was too sensitive because his country, Norway, had published the offensive cartoons of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad. Egeland called the excuse ridiculous, arguing that Sudan’s government wanted to prevent him from seeing the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Darfur.

Egeland said Wednesday the government has now invited him to come, and he will arrive in Khartoum on Saturday, visit Darfur on Sunday and Monday, and then travel to eastern Chad “to complete the journey that was aborted nearly one month ago.”

The trip has three objectives: to improve security for the relief workers and the people they are trying to help, to try to get more cooperation from the government and rebels for humanitarian work, and to appeal for immediate funding, he said.

“We are way behind this year compared to last year in actually keeping the pipeline of food, water, sanitation and health to 3 million people,” Egeland said. “We have less money this year and we have more mouths to feed.”

Because of increasing insecurity, he said, “we are already out of contact with hundreds of thousands of people who depend on us, and it could unravel in the sense that we lost contact with much larger groups, to whom we are the only lifeline.”

Egeland said the international community needs to focus more on the desperate plight of the 3 million people whose rations are being cut in half because of a shortage of funds, and on finding money to beef up support for the 7,000 African Union troops on the ground in Darfur than on planning for a U.N. peacekeeping force that may replace them.

“I appreciate that the world is really working with us to get a U.N. force on the ground in some months from now,” Egeland said.

“But my concern is that the whole thing could fall apart in days from now unless we get more funding for the humanitarian operation, and more resources also to sustain the African Union operation — which would have to fend off all of this insecurity until months from now (when) there is a U.N. force,” he said.

“I think the international community has focused so much on getting a long-term solution through a U.N. force and so on, one is not so aware of us trying to survive the next weeks,” Egeland said.

The three-year conflict between Darfur’s rebels, mainly ethnic African farming tribes, and the Arab-dominated central government has killed about 180,000 people — mostly through disease and hunger — and displaced 2 million. Egeland said in April that an additional 200,000 people were forced to flee their homes in the previous four months.

Decades of low-level tribal clashes over land and water in Darfur erupted into large-scale violence in early 2003 with rebels demanding regional autonomy. The central government is accused of responding by unleashing Arab militias known as Janjaweed upon civilians — a charge it denies.

(ST)