Rising violence cuts food deliveries into Darfur

NAIROBI, Nov 9 (Reuters) – Rising violence in Sudan’s Darfur region has driven 150,000 people from their homes in the past month and deprived an even larger number of people of emergency food supplies, U.N. aid officials said on Tuesday.

Sudan Liberation Army rebels move through the desert east of El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state November 8, 2004. (Reuters).

Fighting involving the Sudan Liberation Army and other rebel factions, as well as police and army units, has intensified in recent weeks, rendering large areas of territory inaccessible to aid workers.

Outbreaks of feuding between farmers and herders — common in western Sudan at this time of year — has led to heightened insecurity in Darfur, scene of what the United Nations calls the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

Jan Pronk, the U.N. envoy for Darfur, has warned the area could descend into anarchy unless the U.N. Security Council takes bold action and thousands of African Union troops arrive quickly.

The United Nations’ World Food Programme (WFP) said it had delivered food to 1.1 million people in Darfur in October, down nearly 175,000 from September.

“The main reason for the fall was insecurity spreading across Darfur, and escalating violence that is undermining WFP’s ability to operate effectively in a region of western Sudan as big as France,” WFP said in a statement issued in Nairobi.

U.N. officials are particularly concerned about 200,000 people who are cut off from help by insecurity after fleeing their homes into parts of the mountainous Jebel Marra area and into remote stretches of north Darfur.

In Nairobi, Sudanese Humanitarian Affairs Minister Ibrahim Mahmoud Hamid said the humanitarian situation was generally improving across the country, and that thousands of people forced to flee their homes in Darfur were returning.

“The situation as a whole is very much improved,” he told a news conference. “We have a lot of people in Darfur now who are going back to their places of voluntary return.”

The United Nations says 70,000 people have died from disease and malnutrition since March, a figure disputed by the Sudanese government. More than 1.5 million people have fled their homes as a result of the violence.

In early 2003, two African rebel groups staged an uprising against what they said was unjust treatment by Khartoum and Arab nomads over land and water resources. Arab militia, known as Janjaweed, helped the government retaliate, often killing civilians.