INTERVIEW-Sudan aid urgent to avoid new tensions-donor
By Alister Doyle
OSLO, April 5 (Reuters) – Donors must be generous in helping Sudan rebuild after a 21-year civil war or risk renewed tensions in the south, the host of an aid conference to be held next week said on Tuesday.
Norwegian Development Minister Hilde Frafjord Johnson urged nations to meet a request by Sudan for $2.6 billion in aid despite concerns over the crisis in Sudan’s western region of Darfur.
“I appeal to all donors to give generously,” she told Reuters. “If people in the south see no dividend from peace, then tensions can increase.”
The Oslo talks on April 11-12 are meant to bolster a deal in January to end Africa’s longest civil war, between southern rebels and Khartoum.
“About 500,000 refugees have already returned to the south and are in critical need,” she said. “Some have walked for months … from Khartoum, voting for peace with their feet.”
“They have been living for years in this situation and they need to see something changing on the ground,” she said.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and delegates from about 60 countries and international organisations will attend the donors’ conference.
Sudan reckons it will need $7.8 billion between July 2005 and the end of 2007 to build roads and railways, establish health care and schools in areas wrecked by the war.
It will seek about $2.6 billion of the total from foreign donors with the rest funded from revenues from its oil production of about 320,000 barrels per day.
More than 2 million people were killed and 4 million displaced by the civil war.
Rebels in the mainly animist and Christian south took up arms in 1983 when Khartoum tried to impose Islamic law on the country. The war was complicated by issues of oil, ethnicity and ideology.
DARFUR
Johnson, who is co-chair of a donors’ group known as the IGAD partners’ forum, said aid destined for the south would go via a fund run by the World Bank to ease concerns about helping Khartoum before the separate Darfur crisis is resolved.
The United Nations says Sudan has done little to disarm Arab militia accused of widespread rape, killing and burning of non-Arab villages in Darfur during a two-year rebel uprising.
More than 2 million people have fled their homes and tens of thousands have been killed.
The U.N. Security Council voted last week to send Darfur war crimes cases to the new International Criminal Court. Tens of thousands of Sudanese protested against the decision in Khartoum on Tuesday.
Johnson said the Oslo donors’ talks would include high-level delegates from Egypt, India, China and the Arab League. “There will be a much larger presence (than usual) of developing countries intending to assist in the reconstruction of one of their own,” she said.
She also said aid promised to help nations recover from the Dec. 26 Indian Ocean tsunami that killed almost 300,000 people should not be at the expense of aid for Sudan.