Urgent need for Darfur negotiations: aid groups

Nov 14, 2006 (PARIS) — Two leading humanitarian organizations called on Tuesday for the “urgent resumption of negotiations on Darfur,” warning against “disastrous consequences” for hundreds of thousands of refugees imperiled by a surge of violence in the region.

Medecins du Monde (Doctors of the World) and Action Against Hunger, both based in France, jointly said in a communique that a UN-backed peace accord signed in May by the government and a single rebel faction “has, to date, been counter-productive.”

The two organizations — active since 2004 in the Darfur region, where they together count 1,000 staff — asked “the international community to gather, once again, all the parties around the negotiating table.”

Darfur, a province in western Sudan as big as France, has been in the grips of a vicious civil war since 2003 that has caused 200,000 deaths and displaced 2.5 million people over the last three years, according to the United Nations.

After a lull in the violence, clashes have increased between Sudanese military forces and rebels, as well as among the rebels themselves.

In the unusually broad statement, the two non-governmental organizations declared that “the deployment of UN troops” — approved by the UN in August, but not yet carried out — “cannot by itself resolve the crisis and guarantee the security of the civilian population.”

“A political framework gathering the largest possible number of actors, including the parties to the conflict, is indispensable,” said the statement.

“The failure to do so would create the conditions for a genuine catastrophe, both security and humanitarian.”

(AFP)