Sudan: The shortcomings in the political and financial response from the international community to the growing humanitarian crisis in Darfur, Sudan, were raised yesterday by Irish and international aid agencies as food air drops got under way over huge swathes of territory cut off by rains.
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) said less than 50 per cent of its two-month old appeal for assistance had been provided. But latest figures indicate that it still managed to deliver food to 940,000 people displaced by the conflict over the last month.
The WFP air drops, which began on Monday, are targeting 72,000 people in seven locations who have been cut off from aid by the rainy season and on-going insecurity.
A further 200,000 people are being provided with food by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) which, as part of its protection work, continues to gather testimony of attacks on civilians by the marauding armed militia, the Janjaweed, as ICRC teams reach areas which were previously inaccessible.
GOAL director John O'Shea, who recently visited the north Darfur area, made a plea yesterday to the British Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, to use the word 'genocide' to describe what is happening in Darfur at the next meeting of the UN Security Council.
He criticised the UN Security Council as "ineffective for its failure to term the attacks on the civilian population as genocide because legally they would then be obliged to actually do something about it, instead of leaving it to the aid agencies. This is not about aid, this is about protection. It's an absolute disgrace that these people are being left to the mercies of the Janjaweed militia and the Khartoum government which is deeply implicated in this tragedy."
The start of expensive air drops is a telling indicator of just how desperate the situation is becoming for many thousands of displaced people in the region. The Darfur air drop operation is based in El-Obeid to the east of Darfur and consists of an Antonov-12 and an Ilyushin-76, the familiar war-horses of such operations in Africa, with a maximum capacity between them of 44 tonnes.
The UN continues to put pressure on the Khartoum government, largely through the threat of sanctions, to rein in the Janjaweed militia which human rights groups accuse of murder, rape and looting in response to attacks which got under way in Darfur early last year by the Sudanese Liberation Movement/Army.
Even if the UN special representative to Sudan, Mr Jan Pronk, makes meaningful progress with the Sudanese government on developing a plan of action for a return to normality, the WFP estimates that the demand for food aid will steadily grow from 1.2 million people in need at present to two million by the time the rainy season ends in September/October.
Hence the desperate requirement for support from donors now if the costly logistical needs of the operation are to be maintained. WFP has received $78.5 million out of $195 million required for its Darfur emergency work in 2004. The lion's share of this has come from the US - $46 million - while the combined total from the EU Commission and member EU countries comes to just $21.6 million, including $1.2 million from Ireland.
UN officials have commented privately on the difference in the speed of donor response to humanitarian needs in Darfur in comparison to the faster response to more high-profile and politically sensitive humanitarian needs in places like Afghanistan and Iraq.
WFP and its partners on the ground distributed 15,475 tonnes of food to 940,160 beneficiaries in July, according to figures made available last night. This fell just short of the targets of 16,600 tonnes of food for 994,000 people.
The air drops are the first visible sign that the effort will be dramatically scaled up in the coming weeks. A WFP fleet of 120 all-terrain trucks has been assembled in Port Sudan on the Red Sea but it will take them an estimated three weeks to reach Darfur.
The Libyan government has also given permission to re-open the old slave trading route that runs from Benghazi into Chad, creating a new supply route for the burgeoning refugee camps springing up inside Chad on the Sudanese border. The first food convoys to take this route should get underway in the next two to three weeks, according to WFP officials in Geneva.
The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees started a verification exercise yesterday of the numbers of refugees in nine border camps whose population is currently estimated at 144,500. A new camp is being prepared by the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, which will house 17,000 people.
Conditions are also deteriorating on the Chad side of the border because of the rains.
The French military has deployed a Hercules C-130 aircraft and Puma helicopters to bring 40 tonnes of materials to the refugee camps.