Malnutrition, lawlessness are increasing in Darfur – UN
September 1, 2007 (UNITED NATIONS) — Malnutrition is increasing in Sudan’s violence-wracked Darfur region along with lawlessness and the number of people fleeing their homes, a senior U.N. official said.
“The humanitarian situation in the last few months has become more critical in many parts of Darfur,” Assistant Secretary-General Margareta Wahlstrom, the U.N.’s deputy humanitarian chief, told a news conference Friday.
She said she expects Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to raise the worsening humanitarian situation in Darfur with Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir when he visits Sudan next week.
The humanitarian operation in Darfur remains the largest in the world, as it has been for the past three years, with 4 million people now dependent on humanitarian assistance as a consequence of the protracted conflict, rising tension and increasing lawlessness, she said.
She said 18 spot surveys by U.N. agencies and nongovernmental organizations in the three Darfur provinces all found that for the first time in three years the number of malnutrition cases has increased beyond the emergency threshold of 15 percent to “well over 17 percent being detected in some areas.”
Since 2004 when a huge humanitarian effort was launched to help civilians caught in the four-year Darfur conflict, Wahlstron said, “the situation stabilized from a health and nutritional perspective.”
“This is the first time we see the potential for a deterioration which we are very worried” about, she said.
While there is still a question of whether the increasing malnutrition represents a permanent deterioration, or whether it is the result of the lean season between harvests, Wahlstrom emphasized that in past years “we have never seen a decline.”
“We put this in the context of the very unstable situation in the area,” she said.
U.N. agencies will continue to do surveys and try to counteract the trend, Wahlstrom said.
More than 200,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been uprooted since ethnic African rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated Sudanese government in 2003, accusing it of decades of neglect. Sudan’s government is accused of retaliating by unleashing a militia of Arab nomads known as the janjaweed, a charge it denies.
Wahlstrom said that since the beginning of the year 250,000 people have been displaced, including 55,000 from June until Aug. 21.
She said the daily attacks, banditry, lawlessness and other violence that affects Darfurians has also affected aid workers. The number of incidents directed against aid workers, from car hijackings to the looting of convoys and violent attacks against individuals, has increased by 150 percent, she said.
“A credible cease-fire and controlling the lawlessness in Darfur are really the two bottom lines that need to be sustained,” Wahlstrom said. “Without this, to expect that people will return safely and voluntarily to their original locations is not a very realistic proposition.”
“Our message is we have to sustain the humanitarian operations well into 2008 before … people will feel secure enough in their locations to engage with some long-term (development) efforts,” she said.
(AP)