Jeevan Vasagar in N'DjamenaFriday August 20, 2004
The UN refugee agency accused Sudan yesterday of breaking its promises in Darfur, as more refugees fled to neighbouring Chad from a fresh wave of attacks on civilians.
Hundreds have crossed the border in recent weeks after assaults on 11 villages which fitted the pattern of the government-sponsored campaign of ethnic cleansing in the westerrn region.
The UN fears that a further 100,000 refugees may head for Chad in the coming months and has drawn up contingency plans to build a further seven camps near the border.
There are already nine vast camps along the border, holding an estimated 190,000 people, and a tenth is being built.
Sudan accused of breaking its word as more refugees flee....***Also see,
Death and Sorrow Stalk Sudanese Across Border, by Somini Sengupta, writing from Bahai, Chad.
By contrast, Laurie Goering reports from Khartoum:
Large-scale deaths in Sudan likely to be averted, U.N. says.
How to reconcile? On the one hand, it seems that there have been successes, as OCHA manager Mike McDonagh claims. 952,000 people were fed by the WFP. But there have been reports of people not having food ration cards, and of rations being cut. And some camps, such as those in SLA territory, have only recently been reached by UN agencies. That's inside camps administered by the WFP. Are people being adequately fed in these camps? Is the rate of global nutrition falling? Has mortality fallen below the crisis level?
Secondly, there is the issue of the number of displaced. The most recent number offered by UN officials is 1.4 million, not the 1 million McDonagh offers, nor the 1.25 million offered by Goering, which reflects last month's official estimate. John Prendergast of the International Crisis Group has charged the UN of lowballing, and suggests that the number will continue to climb. Noting that Darfur has a base population of 6 to 7 million, and observing that half of the villages in Darfur have been destroyed (presumably that fact is based upon satellite photographs commissioned by USAID and Amnesty International, though conceivably this fact was confirmed to him by his own observations), he implies that the actual number of displaced may be more like 3 million.
Is there evidence one way or another? Recently one official in an SPLA territory announced that 50,000 displaced Darfuris were living in his county, and he appealed for help from international agencies (
SPLA-held area appeals for help with Darfur displaced). Kim Sengupta, reporting for the Indepenent, has run across several communities that have fled their homes, are suffering horribly, but are not being served by any UN agency or NGO. This suggests that the actual number of displaced people is much larger than the number in camps administered by the UN.
(Of course there are many thousands of Darfuris who have fled into Egypt and beyond. Their living conditions are often far from ideal, but OCHA is not tasked with providing them emegency assistance.)
I would like to believe that widespread acute malnutrition has been effectively countered, that hepatitis has been contained, and that violence has abated, as McDonagh claims. This doesn't square with other reporting, however. There is little chance of getting more quality reporting from Darfur since the government has cracked down on prominent foreign journalists.
Some human rights activists have charged that the government of Sudan prefers to parade outside observers through model camps such as Abu Shouk much the way the Nazi's used Theresienstadt as a showcase for their humane treatment of Jews. Whatever the merits of such an argument, it is undeniable that conditions vary among the camps in Darfur, and that the government of Sudan restricts foreign access to many areas of Darfur. It is thus impossible to get an accurate picture of the full extent of the crisis, or, therefore, to assess the degree of success the aid agencies are having. I would assume that aid workers are doing the best they can given the political, diplomatic, monetary, logistical, and metereological impediments to their mission.
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