Right to food and relief are hampered in Darfur – aid workers
Dec 12, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — Not even the most basic food or relief is reaching many thousands of people in Sudan’s war-torn Darfur despite the world’s biggest humanitarian effort. The spiraling violence has forced many aid workers to pull out.
The obstacles are numerous. Some 200 World Food Program trucks are currently being blocked by the government from reaching Darfur, apparently for bureaucratic reasons or because of worries of violence, said Kenro Oshidari, the Sudan director for the U.N. agency.
Seventy-four WFP vehicles have been attacked and one driver killed since a peace treaty was signed in May between Khartoum and one of the Darfur rebel factions. Violence has only increased since the deal, which other rebels rejected.
Last month, janjaweed fighters ripped apart a WFP warehouse and looted 8,000 tons of food in the rebel stronghold of Bir Maza as government forces assaulted the town, the worst incident of looting to date. “We seriously complained to the government,” Oshidari said.
The U.N. Human Rights Council held an emergency meeting Tuesday in Geneva to assess just how bad the crisis has become in Darfur.
“Food security is one of the most basic human rights, and it’s constantly being challenged in Darfur,” said Oshidari.
The increasing violence has forced U.N. and aid workers to pull back their relief efforts almost daily. Over 200 have had to leave remote outposts and refugee camps and some of the region’s main towns _ like the North Darfur capital of El Fasher, which was looted last week by janjaweed.
Three water engineers working with the U.N. Children’s Fund were killed in June by refugees who thought they came to poison a well rather than fix it. Nine others were abducted in October and five are still being held, said UNICEF spokesman Edward Carwardine. “Security is our most serious impediment throughout Darfur,” he said. Over a dozen aid workers have also been slain in recent months.
The World Food Program is the sole source of food for some 1.8 million people in Darfur, who without the U.N.’s help would starve because they fear marauding militias will kill or rape them if they leave the refugee camps to cultivate their fields. The WFP provides part of the food needs for nearly a million more people.
But it currently cannot reach some 100,000 others in desperate need, leaving them to rely on their own resources to find food _ a number that fluctuates widely as lines of combat change. A few months earlier, as many as 470,000 people were out of reach.
The U.N. has called the Darfur conflict the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. More than 200,000 people have been killed and more than 2.5 million driven from their homes in the three-year fight between the government and ethnic African rebels. The government is accused of unleashing the janjaweed _ made up of Arab tribesmen _ to help in putting down the revolt, and the militia is accused of widespread atrocities against civilians
The U.N. and aid groups have responded with its biggest current humanitarian effort _ nearly 1 million tons of food delivered to Darfur, at a cost of over $1 billion dollars since April 2004, mobilizing 15,000 Sudanese and international aid workers.
It has created the longest food chain in Africa, with trucks going some 3,000 kilometers (1,800 miles) _ a third on unpaved roads _ from a Red Sea port to the West Darfur town of El Geneina near the Chadian border.
WFP officials say they have brought the malnutrition rate below emergency levels in Darfur since 2005.
But they are having increasing trouble in delivering aid. Two years ago, the WFP could freely access all of Darfur, a vast, landlocked region of western Sudan that is nearly the size of Texas.
“But now we have to fly by helicopter” to many locations because of dangerous roads, Oshidari said.
The magnitude of the relief can be measured at the WFP’s transit warehouse, a set of industrial-sized buildings on the outskirts of Khartoum, near the remains of a factory destroyed in a 1998 American airstrike.
Early Tuesday morning, workers busily loaded 50-kilogram (100 pound) bags of rice off massive trailer trucks, each of which can carry over 80 tons of food. The supplies were to be put on smaller trucks that can handle the unpaved roads out to Darfur.
“Today isn’t a busy day, we only have 1,000 tons to handle,” said Lemma Bayissa, a WFP logistician. “At times, we’ve had to work until midnight to get all the bags through,” he said, pointing at the sacks from the US Agency for International Development _ which provides half of the food for Darfur.
Aid agencies warn yet another peril could be looming: funder fatigue.
The WFP had to reduce food rations this year because it was lacking cash, and though Oshidari is confident international donors will provide most of the $685 million needed for 2007, he wonders what will come next.
He fears the crisis could just drag on, with aid workers in Darfur barely helping people survive.
“A political solution has to be found,” he said. “Or donors will tire.”
(AP)