FEATURE-Denied aid, Darfur may relive south Sudan agony
By Mike Pflanz
NAIROBI, July 22 (Reuters) – Brought to its knees by war, destitute southern Sudan offers a glimpse of Darfur’s likely fate if the aid effort stalls or the outside world starts to forget about its plight.
That’s the argument heard increasingly among relief experts seeking help for the remote western area where an 18-month-old war has created one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
A new report about the damage an older, separate war has done to rebel-held areas of the south is being cited by aid agencies as the best indicator yet of what may lie in store for Darfur if help does not come soon.
The United Nations says war in Darfur has displaced more than 1 million people and killed as many as 30,000 since African rebels launched a revolt against Khartoum in February 2003.
In the south, more than 2 million people have been killed and 4 million displaced by 21 years of war between rebels and Khartoum in a conflict complicated by oil and ethnicity.
The report on war damage to the south makes sombre reading.
For example, in southern rebel-held regions, where state services are non-existent, a girl has more chance of dying in pregnancy or childbirth than of completing primary school.
Some 95,000 under-fives are estimated to have died in 2003, mostly of preventable diseases, in rebel-held southern areas where 7.5 million people live. That is 19,000 more than the total number of under-five deaths among the 31 industrialised nations with a combined population of 938 million.
SHATTERED COMMUNITIES
The statistics come from a report produced by a Sudanese research group affiliated to the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), the main southern rebel movement due to be part of a power-sharing interim government under planned peace accords.
A survey of independent studies by a range of experts, the report was written in association with UNICEF with help from the World Bank, World Food Programme and other U.N. agencies.
“If the conflict in Darfur continues for months or years, we will easily have a very difficult humanitarian situation [where] the indicators may be even worse than we have seen for the south,” said Bernt Aasen, UNICEF operations chief in the south.
Landmark accords signed on May 26 cleared final hurdles to a full peace deal for the south between the Sudanese government and the SPLA. But the deal does not cover the separate conflict in Darfur.
With peace on the horizon, southerners are preparing to rebuild their shattered communities.
The report gives an idea of the size of their task, saying the rebel-held south ranks as the worst place in the world for many key indicators of women and children’s well-being, including its rates of chronic malnutrition, primary school completion, immunisation and ante-natal care.
FAST FORWARD
Rebel-held parts of the south have none of the state schools and hospitals seen, albeit at varying levels of development, in government-held areas, including regions such as Darfur.
So foreign relief agencies for years have flown to the south to provide food, health care, education and livestock services, subject to occasional curbs on access placed by Khartoum and to the ebb and flow of funding by international donors.
The basics of food and health have had to be the priority.
“Southern Sudan is a story about humanitarian aid that merely keeps body and soul together — but is not able to lift people up from their knees,” said Ben Parker, spokesman for the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan.
“We are saving lives, but the trend in social indicators has been downwards over a long period,” said Parker, who helped produce the report.
“In Darfur, the rapidity of the displacement, impoverishment, destitution and sheer pessimism mean it is like south Sudan on fast-forward.”
The report estimates that in rebel-held areas in the south, daily per person income is 25 U.S. cents, a total of $90 all year — about four times lower than government-held areas.
In a southern Sudanese family with seven children, at least one and more likely two sons or daughters will die before their fifth birthday, mostly from preventable disease.
Half the children left behind are sick at any one time and most are malnourished, but they must wait in line for the nearest doctor, who has up to 70,000 patients. Safe water and even basic hole-in-the-ground toilets are rare.
Only Afghanistan under the Taliban educated fewer of its daughters, the report says.
“What is beginning in Darfur is very similar to what has happened in the south,” said one of the report’s authors, Luka Biong Deng.
The report “Towards a Baseline: Best Estimates of Social Indicators for Southern Sudan” is published by the New Sudan Centre for Statistics and Evaluation in association with UNICEF, the lead agency of Operation Lifeline Sudan, an umbrella organisation of relief agencies working in southern Sudan.