INTERVIEW-Sudanese need food, not politics – MSF
By Oliver Bullough
MOSCOW, Aug 2 (Reuters) – Thousands of Sudanese villagers who have fled militia attacks will die if the world does not double the amount of food sent to the region, the head of Medecins Sans Frontieres said on Monday.
MSF International President Rowan Gillies recently returned from a month working in Sudan’s western Darfur province, where 30,000 people have been killed and more than 1 million displaced in a conflict with Arab militias.
The United Nations on Friday gave Sudan a 30-day deadline to disarm the militias, but Gillies said refugees were so weakened by hunger that epidemics could sweep through their camps if food aid was not sent immediately.
“There is a massive lack of response to what has happened, and in the end for the people on the ground what that means is a lack of food,” he told Reuters in an interview in Moscow.
He was in Moscow to check up on operations and talk to officials about a scandal surrounding a ransom paid for the release of an MSF worker kidnapped in Russia’s North Caucasus.
“The World Food Programme needs to step up and provide more food than they are already,” he said. “We think the amount of food being provided is about 50 percent of requirements.”
ONLY THE BEGINNING
According to U.S. estimates, 50,000 people may have died of hunger and disease in Darfur. Gillies said that toll could be only the start of a humanitarian catastrophe.
“The risk of epidemics over the next six months is very, very high,” he said.
“I understand at least $100 million to $200 million has been committed already and, if the response I see is from that amount of money, then at least double that or more is required.”
Outrage from Western governments and suggestions that Europe and the United States could deploy troops have put pressure on Sudan’s government, which has promised to disarm the militias but says it cannot meet the U.N. deadline.
The U.S. Congress has declared the Darfur violence to be genocide, but a unified political response has been complicated by differences between Western, African and Arab governments.
Many Arab states suspect ulterior motives in Western threats against Sudan, which has a large Arab population.
Gillies said the world’s political response was irrelevant in the short term. Humanitarian organisations needed to send food urgently whatever the outcome of U.N. discussions.
“Political responses need time, three months, six months, nine months. And there are people who are alive today who, like a child I treated two weeks ago who died, will die in six months whatever the response is,” he said.
“For our patients, it will not make much difference what the arguments are at the Security Council level.”
He declined to say on whether troops would help stabilise the region, but said they should not be seen as a cure-all. “Generally, we would always caution that more troops is not necessarily the right answer,” he said.