Sudanese refugees struggle beyond the reach of relief organizations

By Sudarsan Raghavan, Knight Ridder Newspapers

SHIGAKARO, Sudan, Sep 9, 2004 (KRT) — Hawa Basi, cradling her sick child in the fierce sunlight, has nowhere to go and nowhere to return to.

She lived in the hamlet of Bameshi, not too far from here. But when Sudanese planes bombed a nearby village, she and her three children fled for the hills, forced out as much by the hunger in their bellies as the fear in their hearts.

Now she’s too frightened to return to Bameshi and too weak to make the two-week-long journey on foot to the refugee camps of neighboring Chad.

Tens of thousands of others share her plight, hunkered down in rebel-controlled portions of Sudan’s Darfur region, in a kind of humanitarian no-man’s land.

They spend their nights huddled in caves and bushes, hiding from the bombers, Sudanese soldiers and the state-backed Arab militias, called the janjaweed, that have hunted them for months. They survive on wild roots and the mercy of strangers who are barely better off in villages such as Shigakaro that are protected by rebels.

“We are just waiting for help,” said Basi, wearing a blue shawl and a faint smile.

But help, at least from the international community, hasn’t been coming. There are no refugee camps, no feeding centers and no relief agencies based in rebel-controlled areas. Traveling to camps in government-controlled areas is too dangerous because refugee might be considered rebel sympathizers.

Ongoing insecurity, overstretched aid workers and a shortage of funding are largely to blame for the lack of aid in rebel-controlled areas.

“Tell them we’re suffering from three things – lack of food, (lack of) medicines and the enemy,” implored Umda Ali Hassib, the chief of Shigakaro, 70 miles east of Sudan’s border with Chad. “If you look in the four corners of the Earth, you wouldn’t find a regime as cruel as this one.”

No one has counted how many refugees are wandering the rebel portions of Darfur, and they aren’t counted among the 1.2 million people the United Nations says have been chased from their villages by the janjaweed and the bombs.

“There are huge numbers of people that have fallen through the humanitarian cracks” in rebel-controlled areas,” said John Prendergast, a Sudan analyst with the research organization International Crisis Group who recently visited the area. “A silent emergency is unfolding totally beyond the eyes and reach of the aid system.”

The Sudanese government has used food as a weapon by obstructing aid to needy civilians. But in the last few weeks, under international pressure, it’s granted the U.N.’s World Food Program and other agencies access to rebel-controlled areas to assess the situation and bring limited aid.

Now the rebels are demanding that the U.N. staff its aid missions with people living in areas controlled by the Sudan Liberation Army, U.N. officials say. Such an arrangement would give the rebels more control over the flow of aid. U.N. officials say they’re concerned that any assistance would be diverted to the rebels or be used to buy loyalty.

In recent weeks, the rebels also have abducted aid workers from the World Food Program and other agencies, releasing them only under international pressure. Rebel leaders say the workers had entered their territories and that they held them to verify their identities.

“We never abused these organizations,” said Adam Ali Shogar, a senior SLA leader in neighboring Chad. “We request the international community to come and help our people.”

It’s clear that the rebels themselves need assistance. Shogar said his forces are “running out of both food and fuel” and warned that they may have to attack government targets to gather food.

On a recent weeklong journey with the rebels, it was obvious they were short on supplies. A rebel marksman frequently shot at and missed large birds – “big meat,” another rebel said every time he saw one. When the marksman shot a small antelope in the leg, the rebels pursued the wounded creature for 45 minutes before killing it, skinning it and tying the meat to the back of their battered Toyota Land Cruiser.