Attacks on aid groups cripple Darfur relief
Jan 26, 2007 (NAIROBI) — Attacks on aid workers and vehicle hijackings are crippling relief efforts in Darfur, the head of an international agency said on Friday after a visit to the Sudanese region.
“In just the last couple of months, 12 aid workers have been killed, five are missing, and 90 agency vehicles have been hijacked,” said Tom Arnold, chief executive of Concern Worldwide, referring to attacks on his and other agencies.
“The growing insecurity on the ground is making it ever more difficult to access the population,” Arnold added in a gloomy assessment of a conflict he foresaw dragging out for years.
Arnold’s comments, after a week in West Darfur, added to growing complaints by aid organisations that violence against them is obstructing efforts to help an estimated 2.5 million people displaced by conflict.
France’s Action Contre La Faim said this week an international aid worker had been raped and a mock execution carried out during an attack on its compound in December in rebel-controlled Gereida town.
Some 14,000 aid workers operate in Darfur.
“We can no longer risk travelling over ground between our camps,” Arnold told Reuters. “The space we can operate in is ever-shrinking. This is the pattern for all aid agencies.”
While the Sudanese government and rebels generally blame each other for attacks on aid workers, the organisations themselves normally refer only to armed attackers.
Experts estimate 200,000 people have died in four years of violence that Washington calls genocide. The conflict will again come under the international spotlight at an African Union (AU) summit in Ethiopia on Monday and Tuesday.
LONG-TERM CRISIS
Arnold was pessimistic about quick solutions, saying Concern was working on the assumption that its camps for the displaced would still be there in 2012.
“The crisis will only worsen through 2007, for displaced people and aid workers, unless there is greater recognition from the international community, and a significant improvement in security,” he said.
“At least another five years is the working assumption for our camps, by which time they will house eight-year-old children who were born there.”
Difficulties facing aid workers affect particularly the tens of thousands of children stranded in camps, forcing education onto the back burner, Arnold said.
Concern’s main camp at Mornai in West Darfur, which people are scared to leave for fear of attacks, holds 80-90,000 people, nearly half of them of school age.
Yet the camp has only one secondary school, and each primary school cares for some 2,800 children, with nearly 150 students per teacher, Arnold said. “If things continue the way they are, these people may never get out of these camps,” he said.
(Reuters)