Govt trying to force Darfur’s displaced to return home – UN
NAIROBI, July 20, 2004 (IRIN) — The Sudanese government is increasingly bringing pressure to bear on internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the Darfur region to return to their homes, despite the fact that it has not fulfilled its commitment to improve security, according to UN agencies.
Small-scale forcible relocation of IDPs had already started with the movement of about 4,000 people from al-Meshtel camp to Abu Shawk camp outside Al-Fashir, the capital of Northern Darfur State, just hours before UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited on 2 July. A second incident involved the movement of 7,000 people from Nyala, the capital of Southern Darfur, to Kalma camp, the UN reported.
On 17 July, agencies received “alarming” reports that the governor of Western Darfur State and the local humanitarian aid commissioner were planning to relocate 25 percent of the IDPs, or 1,000 families, from Murnei to “predestined relocation sites”. Murnei, one of Darfur’s biggest camps, is home to about 80,000 IDPs.
Following protests by various agencies the move was suspended, the UN reported.
To access the latest UN situation reports on Darfur go to www.unsudanig.org
On 1 July, the Sudanese interior minister and the government’s special representative for Darfur, Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Husayn, told reporters in Northern Darfur that it was “most important” to get people to return to their villages. Each state – Darfur region has three – had its own plan of return, he said.
But humanitarian workers fear that a forcible mass return of over one million IDPs in Darfur could result in enormous fatalities.
The planting season ended two weeks ago, the IDPs had no food stocks, and they are already weakened from the lack of food aid. Their villages, which were burned to the ground by government-allied Janjawid militias, who also poisoned many of their wells, were simply uninhabitable, an aid worker in Western Darfur told IRIN.
“The government wants them to go home, the UN wants them to stay,” said another. “There is no food [in the villages]: they will go back to die.”
If they are forced to return, they will have no food sources for at least the next 15 months, until after the next harvest in autumn 2005. Furthermore, it is impossible to distribute food in each of the hundreds of villages from which the IDPs have fled.
During Annan’s visit to Sudan, Khartoum signed a joint communique with the UN which included commitments to immediately disarm the Janjawid militias and other “armed outlaw groups”, to ensure that no militias are present in areas surrounding camps for displaced, to ensure that all movement of IDPs to their homes is done in a “truly voluntary manner” and to undertake “concrete measures” to end impunity.
But the Janjawid presence in and around IDP camps was continuing, as well as attacks and harassment when the IDPs, mostly women, left the camps to collect firewood for cooking, the UN reported. A recent visit to Kas in Southern Darfur revealed that about 60 percent of women had suffered physical and sexual abuse when they ventured out of the town to collect firewood, said a report.
A special court in Darfur reportedly sentenced 10 Janjawid members on Sunday to six years each in jail and the amputation of a foot and a hand (known as cross-amputation: the standard shari’ah punishment for banditry) for armed attacks, robbery and illegal possession of arms. The sentence was the first to be handed down by the court which was set up to end atrocities in the region.
But overall security has not improved. On Saturday, at a meeting of the Joint Implementation Mechanism – the body set up to monitor implementation of the pledges made in the communiqué – UN officials told Khartoum officials that there had been “no progress” on security and protection of IDPs.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said this week that the number of IDPs in Darfur had swelled by 100,000 in the past month to over 1,050,000, with fresh groups of people arriving daily at the numerous IDP camps across the region.
While there have been improvements in allowing humanitarian access to Darfur, some staff have been stopped at checkpoints because local security officials do not recognise the newer, less onerous paperwork. Many agencies are also finding it difficult to find qualified nationals to help with health care.
The number of NGOs operating in Darfur has surged from about 170 at the end of May to a predicted 500 at the end of this month, but not all areas of Darfur have a humanitarian presence.