Sudan death toll: 180,000 die from hunger in Darfur

By JEEVAN VASAGAR & EWEN MACASKILL, The Guardian

NAIROBI/LONDON, Mar 25, 2005 — More than 180,000 people have died from hunger and disease during the past 18 months of the Darfur conflict, the UN said as negotiations continued to break the deadlock on a new security council resolution to impose sanctions on the Sudanese government.

Brian Grogan, a spokesman for Jan Egeland, the UN emergency relief coordinator, said an average 10,000 Sudanese civilians were dying a month, much higher than earlier estimates. They were victims mainly of starvation or of disease in refugee camps after being driven from their villages by soldiers and government-backed Janjaweed militiamen. The estimates exclude those killed in the fighting.

Khartoum accused the UN of producing the figures as a ploy to get the security council to take action against Sudan, and demanded evidence to back up the numbers.

Nearly a year after the UN described Darfur as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, there is no sign the scorched-earth campaign against black African villages is over. Hundreds of new refugees are flooding into overcrowded camps such as the giant settlement at Kalma in south Darfur, which now houses 100,000.