US urges Sudan to allow aid workers immediate access to Darfur
By HARRY DUNPHY, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON, April 27, 2004 (AP) — The United States again urged Sudan on Tuesday to allow aid workers immediate access to the Darfur region to distribute food and other relief supplies before the rainy season starts, in order to avert a potential humanitarian catastrophe.
Andrew S. Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, citing U.N. reports, said the crisis in the western Sudan region, is currently “the worst humanitarian disaster in the world.”
Since late last year, he said, a conflict between Arab militias called the Janjaweed and non-Arab rebel groups has left thousands dead and displaced 900,000 refugees in the three states of Darfur. Another 100,000 have fled across the border into neighboring Chad.
Natsios said the conflict no longer was between nomadic herders and settled farmers but had evolved into a rebellion, putting rebels seeking greater autonomy against the militias backed and supplied by the Sudanese government in Khartoum. Darfur, a largely desert area, is home to one-fifth of Sudan’s 30 million people.
“The number of dead is unclear at this point but it is in the thousands,” he said. “There have been reports of as many as 30,000 dead. We cannot confirm that.”
He stopped short of using the term genocide but said what was taking place “clearly was an ethnic cleansing campaign” by the militias that involved razing of villages, bombing of irrigation systems so crops can’t be replanted, and the systematic rape and branding of women.
Natsios said the conditions in which the refugees were living were deplorable, with food running out, disease spreading and child mortality rates rising steeply.
“We are facing a deadline, the rains are going to start,” he said. “By the end of May and clearly by the end of June, rains will be so bad it will be impossible to move large tonnages of food” because roads will be impassible.
He said the United States, Canada, the European Union and Japan are ready to mount a massive relief effort and called on the Sudanese government to implement a humanitarian access agreement signed earlier this month as part of a cease-fire agreement
Natsios said the government should disarm the militias and issue visas and travel permits so aid workers can get into the country and go to displacement camps outside the cities in Darfur. He said some food was reaching the region but not enough.
“There is very little time left,” he said. “If we do not have this situation resolved by the end of June we are going to face a catastrophic situation by the fall.”
Secretary of State Colin Powell called Sudan’s foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, on Sunday and asked him to do what is necessary to let international aid into Darfur.
Natsios said the United States was waiting for Sudan’s foreign ministry to issue visas to a 28-member U.S. disaster response team standing by in Washington and Nairobi, Kenya.
To date, USAID and the State Department have provided more than $85 million in humanitarian assistance for the crisis in Darfur.