Report says UN failing to protect those displaced by Sudan’s Darfur conflict

By BRADLEY S. KLAPPER, Associated Press Writer

GENEVA, Nov 26, 2004 (AP) — The United Nations is failing to adequately protect millions of people displaced by conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region and violence in other hotspots around the world, a U.N. report said Friday.

Women carry water at Abushouk camp near El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, November 21, 2004. (Reuters).

The global body’s approach to the problem of internally displaced persons — people who have fled their homes but not crossed any international borders — “is still largely ad hoc and driven more by the personalities and convictions of individuals on the ground than by an institutional, systemwide agenda,” the report said.

The 102-page study was compiled by the U.N.’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Multiple U.N. agencies have offices that provide assistance to the estimated 25 million internally displaced people worldwide, but there’s no organization that deals solely with the problem, said Dennis McNamara, head of OCHA’s refugee division.

More than 1.8 million people are estimated to have been driven from their homes in the 21-month Darfur conflict, which began when rebel groups took up arms against the Arab-dominated government for what they saw as years of state neglect and discrimination against Sudan’s African tribal population.

The government hit back with a counterinsurgency in which Arab militiamen have carried out a campaign of murder, rape and arson.

International agencies estimate that since March, disease, malnutrition and clashes among the displaced have killed more than 70,000 people. Many more have been killed in the fighting, but no firm estimate of the direct war toll exists.

Three different U.N. agencies have staff in Darfur, but their access to the displaced and their activity there have frequently been limited because Sudan’s government has at times been reluctant to allow outside involvement, McNamara said.

At present the government is allowing the United Nations access to camps in Darfur, but its activity is still limited by a lack of staff and funding. That shortage means that the world body has been unable to provide HIV tests and psychological counseling for rape victims in Darfur’s camps, which McNamara called “unacceptable.”

McNamara said people displaced by fighting in conflict zones in Colombia and northern Uganda are also not getting the U.N. help they need.

“Darfur is only the most dramatic and highly publicized example (of these crises),” McNamara said. “It is by no means the biggest or the longest-lasting.”

In a separate conflict in the south of Sudan, where warring parties are striving to find a peace accord after two decades of fighting, there may be up to three times as many internally displaced people as in Darfur, McNamara said.

Northern Uganda has three times as many as Darfur. An estimated 20,000 of them have been abducted for military service or work as sex slaves, McNamara said.

There are also up to 3 million internally displaced in Congo, and a further 2-3 million in Colombia, according to McNamara.