US says donors not meeting pledges for Darfur aid

WASHINGTON, Oct 5 (AFP) — The United States called Tuesday for international donors to fulfill pledges to provide assistance to stem the crisis in Sudan’s troubled western Darfur region, accusing some nations of failing to live up to their promises.

“We’ve been very outspoken about the need for the international community to do more to help the people of Darfur,” deputy State Department spokesman Adam Ereli said. “It is a problem of a huge scale beyond the capability of any one country.

“There have been pledges from the international community, pledges that are important and necessary, but that have gone unfilled to date,” he told reporters. “It’s important … that they be filled.”

Ereli did not name the countries that have failed to meet their pledges and was unable to specify the amount of the shortfall although on Monday the World Food Program said it was short some 220 million of the 865 million dollars it needs to feed some 11 million refugees worldwide, including 200,000 from Darfur who have crossed the Sudanese border into Chad.

Late last month at a donors conference in Norway, representatives of the Sudanese government and the southern rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM) appealed for the international community to provide about 300 million dollars in aid to cover emergency needs in Darfur.

The United States is the largest single contributor to Darfur aid efforts and on Tuesday, the US Agency for International Development (USAID) gave a 600,000-dollar grant to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to help double the number of human rights monitors there to 16.

To date, Washington has provided 243 million dollars in aid for Darfur, nearly 62 million dollars of which had been earmarked for the refugees in Chad, and expects that figure to rise to nearly 300 million through the end of the next fiscal year, according to USAID.

In addition, the United States has set aside 27.4 million dollars to help fund the African Union monitoring mission in Darfur, USAID said in a statement.