Attack on UN staff in Sudan prompts aid suspension

NAIROBI, Feb 27 (Reuters) – The United Nations said on Friday it had suspended aid to around 30,000 people in southern Sudan after a Sudanese militia fired rocket-propelled grenades at eight of its aid workers in the area.

No one was hurt in the early morning raid on the workers’ camp in western Upper Nile last Friday, but the U.N. said it would put on hold further assistance planned for the area including a polio immunisation campaign due later in the year.

“This direct, deliberate and sustained attack on aid workers is outrageous and intolerable. Attacks on humanitarian workers in conflict situations are war crimes,” said Bernt Aasen, the U.N. deputy humanitarian coordinator for Sudan.

The U.N. said militia armed with rifles, machineguns, rocket-propelled grenades and mortars attacked the site, provoking a counter-attack by the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army/Movement (SPLA/M) who control the area.

The aid workers had been on a four-day mission to deliver blankets, cooking pots and pans, and soap to about 13,500 people affected by the war.

“Planned follow-up activities in the areas of food security, health, agriculture, livestock and water have been shelved indefinitely across several locations in Western Upper Nile,” the U.N. said in a statement. It said around 30,000 people would be affected by the suspension.

Around two million people have been killed in Sudan’s civil war, which for 20 years has pitted the northern Islamist government against rebels from the largely Christian and animist south who want more autonomy.

The country’s vice president Osman Ali Taha and SPLA leader John Garang have been locked in peace talks in neighbouring Kenya.

However, the talks do not cover a separate rebellion in Darfur, western Sudan, where two other rebel groups are fighting the government accusing it of neglecting the poor area and arming nomadic Arab militias to loot and burn African villages.