Sudan denies UN claim its army surrounds refugee camps

KHARTOUM, Sudan, Nov 2, 2004 (AP) — Sudan denied a U.N. claim that Sudanese military and police forces were surrounding several refugee camps Tuesday in the war-torn region of Darfur and refusing access to humanitarian groups.

Christiane Berthiaume, spokeswoman for the U.N. World Food Program, said in Geneva that at least 160,000 refugees in western Darfur cannot be reached by road “because of insecurity.”

She said the U.N. food agency has relocated 88 aid workers, most of them employed by independent aid agencies, from three camps in the Nyala region: Golu, Zaleinge and Nertetie.

“It started at 3 a.m. without any warning,” Berthiaume said. “Agencies have been denied access to these camps since this morning.”

Asked whether army or police forces were surrounding camps, Sudan’s Humanitarian Affairs minister, Ibrahim Hamid said: “There is no siege.”

“It is not true that the government was telling organizations to pull out of the area, and the areas are not besieged,” Hamid told The Associated Press in Khartoum.

“What happened is that angry Arab tribesmen gathered after the abduction of 18 of their men by the rebels. But the African Union has been alerted and they said they would bring those abducted out of the mountainous areas of Zaleinge,” he said.

The rebels Hamid was referring to are non-Arab Africans who began an uprising nearly two years ago. The Sudanese government is accused of backing armed Arab tribesmen known as the Janjaweed, who are in an attempt to put down the uprising. The Janjaweed are blamed for rapes, killings and the burning of villages, bringing on a humanitarian catastrophe in the Darfur region.