US official warns of 1 million deaths in Sudan
By Saul Hudson
INCIRLIK AIR BASE, Turkey, June 29 (Reuters) – Up to 1 million African refugees could die this year in Sudan’s Darfur region due to government-supported ethnic cleansing, a senior U.S. official said on Tuesday.
International donors and relief organisations are racing to beat incoming rains to place food and medicine at camps for those driven from their villages in the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.
Secretary of State Colin Powell will fly to Sudan late on Tuesday in the highest-level U.S. visit for more than two decades to pressure the Khartoum government to allow aid access and stop supporting marauding Arab militia.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, who is expected to meet Powell on Wednesday, will also press the government.
Criticised for responding too slowly to the crisis and under pressure in Congress to do more, Powell will threaten to push for U.N. sanctions against the oil-rich nation and warn government officials they could be pursued as war criminals, U.S. officials have said.
“If nothing changes we will have 1 million casualties. If things improve we can get it down to about 300,000 deaths,” Andrew Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Aid, told Reuters during a stopover in Turkey en route to Sudan.
“Because a lot of the kids are already so malnourished, you just cannot bring them back,” he said.
In a conflict affecting about 2 million people in the western region of Africa’s largest nation, 1.2 million black Africans have fled their homes and live in temporary camps in Darfur and across the border in Chad.
A measles epidemic has erupted in one camp, there has been a case of polio and rains will likely bring mosquitoes and malaria, Natsios said.
The government-backed Janjaweed militia have razed scores of villages and destroyed the water systems of three black African tribes. Neighbouring Arab villages remained intact after the militia horseback raids, sometimes only hundreds of yards away.
Sudan denies it supports the Janjaweed.
The United States has provided more than $100 million in aid since last year for Darfur and expects to spend about $170 million more by the end of 2005, Natsios said.
Washington says it is assessing whether the militias are responsible for genocide, a label that would legally oblige the United States to act to prevent such violence.
The United States hopes Powell’s trip will help raise the profile of the crisis within the Security Council where there is no clear support for international sanctions.
The United States already has an array of its own sanctions against Sudan and could freeze assets of individual officials.
Earlier this year, the government pleased the United States by reaching a settlement in a separate conflict over a long-running civil war with rebels in the south of the country and was taken off a U.S. blacklist of countries with terror ties.