Darfur camps need security not food – EU prize winner

December 13, 2007 (BERLIN) — The European Union must stop feeding Sudan’s Darfur refugees in camps which only makes them an easier target for ethnic cleansing, the bloc’s top human rights prize winner said.

Two days after he was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, Sudanese lawyer Salih Mahmoud Osman said security, not financial aid, was what the region’s people wanted most.

“Survivors are grateful that you are sending money and humanitarian relief,” he told a panel discussion organised by the European Parliament in Berlin. “But they don’t want to remain any more in the camps. You are keeping them there.”

“Indirectly, you are helping the conspiracy of ethnic cleansing. Please don’t feed them any more in the camps: help to protect them (so they can) go back to their homes.”

International experts estimate 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million uprooted in violence in Darfur since mostly non-Arabs took up arms in early 2003 accusing Khartoum of neglect. Osman says the number of refugees was much higher.

Osman, an opposition member of the Sudanese parliament who works for the Sudan Organisation Against Torture, also urged the EU not to provide any money for African Union peacekeepers.

The United Nations aims to send 26,000 peacekeeping forces to police Sudan’s Darfur region, and Osman said all of those not already in place should be drawn from outside Africa.

“Otherwise, you are just wasting money,” he said. “We have had 7,000 African Union forces on the ground for more than three years now. But they never helped the situation there. Atrocities are even increasing and the situation is getting worse.”

(Reuters)