The singer and former Live Aid organiser, Bob Geldof, yesterday appealed to the international community to bring pressure on the Sudanese government amid fears that the country's famine crisis is getting out of control.
Urgent relief aid has been failing to get through to the country because Sudan is locked in a dispute between rebel factions engaged in a civil war.
Geldof yesterday appealed to the public to pressurise Sudan and the rebels into reaching a compromise to end the fighting, which would save up to 350,000 lives.
In language similar to that he used in the 1980s about Ethiopia, Geldof told BBC's Six O'Clock News: "The individual is simply not powerless in this world in the face of that sort of inhumanity.
You have got immense power, and it is to find the outrage to say: `This is still happening. We can stop it'.
"The political will is necessary to stop it happening in perpetuity. It almost appears impenetrable, but it's not impenetrable. These things never are impenetrable. It would be relatively easy to create so much pressure on the government and indeed the rebels that allows some sort of compromise solution that would save, potentially, 350,000 people".
Guardian Service reports:
Daily flights of emergency food aid have begun to reach hundreds of thousands of desperate villagers in southern Sudan. But aid officials in Nairobi and Britain say over two million people will still be in need for several months.
"The situation is very serious, but it's not yet one of famine," Mr Alero Harrison, press officer of the Save the Children Fund, said yesterday. "It's a combination of three years of drought and a very long war."
Most of the people affected live in areas controlled by anti-government rebels, and until January this year they were reached by flights from Kenya. Governments in civil wars usually refuse to authorise cross-border feeding, but the UN last year negotiated an agreement with the Islamic government in Khartoum whereby it accepted the flights to rebel-held areas.
After heavy fighting in January in the province of Bahr al-Ghazal the Sudanese government changed its line and banned all flights by the UN-led Operation Lifeline Sudan, which is headquartered in both Khartoum and Nairobi. In April they resumed.