Sudan govt paralysing Darfur aid effort-Natsios

March 7, 2007 (KHARTOUM) — Sudan’s government is paralysing the humanitarian operation in Darfur with a complex web of bureaucratic obstructions which could cause massive loss of life, U.S. envoy Andrew Natsios said on Wednesday.

After meeting with President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, Natsios said there was still no agreement on allowing non-African peacekeeping troops to assist a cash-strapped and inexperienced African Union mission in Darfur.

Bashir rejects any U.N. troops in Darfur calling it a western attempt to colonise Africa’s largest country.

But Natsios said the most immediate worry was the restrictions and threats facing aid workers in Darfur, where the world’s largest humanitarian effort is under way.

“The greatest immediate threat to the people on the ground is the deteriorating humanitarian space in Darfur,” he told reporters at the end of his trip.

“The government has constructed a very onerous set of bureaucratic requirements which are essentially paralysing the relief effort,” he said.

The government is slow and difficult on visa and travel permits, imposes high customs and delays shipments of equipment at Port Sudan, he added.

He said in 2005 the aid operation had more freedom to be effective than in 2006 so the government merely needed to reintroduce the previous year’s regulations to improve the situation.

In a damning State Department report released on Tuesday, Washington said genocide was ongoing in Darfur. Khartoum denies genocide and says the Western media exaggerates the four-year-old conflict.

Experts estimate 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million driven from their homes since mostly non-Arab rebels took up arms in early 2003 accusing Khartoum of neglecting the arid region.

Violence has escalated despite a May 2006 peace deal signed by only one of three negotiating rebel groups. AU peacekeepers and both international and Sudanese aid workers have come under attack by all sides of the conflict.

But Khartoum still rejects even a compromise hybrid U.N.-AU force.

“We do not think there are sufficient peacekeeping troops with enough experience … to come from Africa … and there are going to have to be troops brought in from other countries,” Natsios said.

“I think this is clearly an issue where we have a disagreement,” he said after his meeting with Bashir.

Natsios said the U.N. Security Council would not vote to fund the AU force until clear U.N. command and control structures — agreed to by the Sudanese government last year — were in place.

“The Security Council is not going to vote for funding unless they have some control of how the money is spent,” Natsios said.

The AU has not paid some of its soldiers for months and is in a funding crisis as it begins another mission in Somalia.

In January it called for the United Nations to take over full funding of the Darfur mission.

Natsios said he expected movement soon on appointing a new head of the AU and U.N. missions, which have both lacked leadership in Sudan for months.

Since U.N. mission head Jan Pronk was expelled last year, the world body in Sudan has taken a back seat on Darfur and given in to government pressure on releasing information on the conflict.

(Reuters)