Sudan disputes UN figure of 300,000 dead in Darfur
April 24, 2008 (KHARTOUM) — A Sudanese presidential aide challenged a new U.N. assessment that as many as 300,000 people have died in the 5-year-old Darfur conflict, saying Thursday the figures were unfounded and intended to put political pressure on the government.
John Holmes, U.N. undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs, gave a grim report on Darfur to the Security Council this week, estimating as many as 300,000 persons have been killed up from the previous U.N. estimate of more than 200,000. He said suffering in the western Sudanese region is worsening, there is no prospect of a political settlement and food rations for the needy are about to be cut in half.
“This is a report that lacked professionalism and which is not based on any documentation,” Mustafa Osman Ismail, an assistant to President Omer al-Bashir and a former foreign minister, told Sudan’s official news agency. “If they continue adding to those figures, one day they will come up with a number that will exceed the whole population of Darfur itself.”
Sudan has consistently maintained that U.N. and other international assessments of the Darfur death toll are inflated.
“In our own calculations, the total number does not exceed 10,000,” Sudan’s U.N. Ambassador Abdel-Mahmood Abdal-Haleem Mohamed said earlier this week in response to Holmes’ new assessment.
He said his government counts only people killed in fighting. There are no dead from malnutrition and starvation “because in Darfur there (are) no epidemics, no starvations,” he claimed. “The exaggerated number given is to serve political ends,” Mohamed said. “It is only to give the impression that the government is not doing much in the peacekeeping to save its own people.”
Holmes predecessor Jan Egeland estimated in 2006 that 200,000 people had lost their lives because of the conflict including deaths from violence, disease and malnutrition. He said this was based on an independent mortality survey released in March 2005 by the U.N. World Health Organization.
“That figure must be much higher now, perhaps half as much again,” Holmes said Tuesday.
Queried by reporters, Holmes said the estimate of 300,000 dead “is not a very scientifically based figure” because there have been no new mortality studies in Darfur. But “it’s a reasonable extrapolation,” he said.
“What I’m saying is if that figure of 200,000 was anything like right in 2006, then that figure must be much higher now,” he said.
Egeland told The Associated Press last month he estimated the toll had risen to around 400,000.
Ismail said the Sudanese government believes the newest U.N. figure was issued under pressure from Darfur aid organizations now active in the West.
The Darfur conflict began in early 2003 when ethnic African rebels took up arms against Sudan’s Arab-dominated central government, accusing it of discrimination and neglect. Many of the worst atrocities in the war have been blamed on the janjaweed militia of Arab nomads allied with the government.
A joint U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force took over duties in Darfur in January from a beleaguered 7,000-man AU mission. But only about 9,000 soldiers and police officers of the authorized 26,000 have deployed.
The U.N. and AU have tried for months to open new peace talks between Sudan and rebel groups following the failure of a 2005 agreement to stem violence. But most rebel chiefs are boycotting the negotiations, and security in Darfur has further deteriorated in recent months.
When former U.N. humanitarian chief Egeland brought the Darfur conflict to the Security Council’s attention in April 2004, he said approximately 750,000 people were in danger. But Holmes told the council this week of Darfur’s estimated 6 million people, some 4.27 million have now been seriously affected by the conflict.
He said nearly many of them have had to flee their homes “some 2.45 million people are sheltering elsewhere in Sudan and 260,000 more in neighboring countries. Some 100,000 civilians have been forced to flee just this year,” Holmes said. Some 60,000 of them were displaced in West Darfur, which has seen an upsurge in violence.
(AP)