UNICEF director Bellamy visits war-ravaged Darfur
NYALA, Sudan, June 13 (AFP) — The director of the United Nations children’s fund UNICEF, Carol Bellamy, arrived in the southern Darfur town of Nyala on Sunday at the start of a two-day tour of the war-ravaged region of west Sudan.
She and her delegation went straight into a meeting with the governor of southern Darfur and senior government officials in the region.
Bellamy was to visit camps for displaced persons in Nyala and talk to local women and children, according to James Elder of the UNICEF news desk in Nyala.
She will be trying to get a “sense of their concerns and what they have been through”, Elder told AFP, adding that the UNICEF director will also listen to the women’s stories about their experiences in the camps.
He said that Bellamy would go to the Kass camp for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs), northeast of Nyala, and also visit a health and nutrition center, as well as water and sanitation projects.
The visit came as UNICEF warned that half a million children were in danger in Darfur.
Bellamy will “see first-hand the life-threatening situation facing hundreds of thousands of children caught in one of the world’s most rapidly developing humanitarian crises”, UNICEF said on the eve of her visit.
The agency was “deeply concerned about the growing vulnerability of the vast displaced population in Darfur, now estimated at some one million people, half of them children.”
Nearly all now face food shortages, outbreaks of disease, exploitation, and the rainy season, which has just started.
Bellamy’s visit also came after UNICEF revised upwards an initial appeal for some 33 million dollars in relief funds for its activities in Darfur. The new figure now stands at 46 millions dollars.
The agency is currently focusing on providing access to safe drinking water, primary health care, shelter material, education and hygiene kits for families.
A major campaign to immunize more than two million children between the ages of nine months and 15 years against measles is underway in the region.
Darfur is in the throes of what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, prompted by a rebel conflict sparked in February 2003 that led to a fierce retaliation by government forces and allied Janjaweed militia.
The European Union, United States and United Nations have all urged Khartoum to rein in the Janjaweed, while Sudan has dismissed charges that ethnic cleansing is being carried out in the region.
The conflict has forced more than 120,000 people to flee across the border into Chad, according to UNICEF.