Fear keeps Darfur people in camps or town, says UK minister
KHARTOUM, Sept 18 (AFP) — A junior British minister said that people living in camps after fleeing their villages because of conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region lived in fear of leaving their temporary homes despite a greater presence now of aid workers.
Minister for African affairs Chris Mullin told a news conference in Khartoum after visiting West and South Darfur states, that people “are terrified of going back home and are equally terrified of venturing one kilometre out of a town.”
He said: “Certainly the big improvement in recent months has been the unfettered access by the international humanitarian aid community to reach the affected areas but there is still a very huge gap if we are to restore some kind of normality to Darfur.”
He added that the African Union mission monitoring a ceasefire between rebels and government troops and their allied Janjaweed militia, needed to be expanded “and we need to encourage the government into accepting the commission proposed by the United Nations.”
Both sides in the 19-month-old conflict repeatedly accuse the other of violating a ceasefire in what the United Nations has termed the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis.
Some 50,000 people have been killed and 1.4 million more displaced since the start of the conflict, according to the UN.
The UN Security Council is due to vote Saturday on a US draft resolution pressing Sudan to rein in the Arab militias largely responsible for the bloodshed and violence in the troubled Darfur region.
The resolution calls on Sudan to disarm and clamp down on the Arab Janjaweed militias, who have waged a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the black African natives of the vast western Darfur region.
It also calls for an expanded presence of African Union monitors in the region and asks the United Nations to establish a commission of enquiry to determine if genocide has occurred.
Mullin told the Khartoum press conference that the government brought in police officers from outside the region to earn the confidence of the people but this had not worked because the people “have suffered badly and have become afraid of anyone in uniform.”
He has declined to use the term “genocide” to describe what was going on in Darfur and preferred, instead, the phrase “serious crimes”.
The United States has classified the slaughter in the region as genocide, and German Defence Minister Peter Struck also referred to the crisis there as “genocide,” in an interview published Saturday.