Senior UN official to visit southern and western regions

The UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator Jan Egeland is to visit Khartoum this week on a mission that includes field visits to southern Sudan and the western region of Darfur, UN officials said. "Egeland will use the trip to highlight the dire funding situation for relief operations, both in Darfur and South Sudan," Dawn Elizabeth Blalock, spokesperson for the UN humanitarian coordinator in Sudan, told IRIN on Wednesday. In Darfur, Egeland is expected to visit groups of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and other affected communities, and look at progress made in providing assistance to the camp populations. He will also assess the impact of the irregular rainfall that the region has received over past years and discuss with authorities how to improve the security of civilians and aid workers affected by the conflict, Blalock said. "Ongoing security concerns and a looming drought throughout Sudan threaten to undermine the recent improvements in the humanitarian situation, and the ability of the UN and its partners to respond to the needs of the people of Darfur," a statement from the UN office in Sudan said. In southern Sudan, Egeland will meet members of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) and various relief agencies in Rumbek, the provisional capital of southern Sudan. He is also scheduled to visit Malualkon in Northern Bahr el Ghazal state, an area to which thousands of IDPs have returned since 2004. Following the 9 January signing of the comprehensive peace agreement between the Sudanese government and the SPLM/A, hundreds of thousands of people, who were displaced during the decades of war, are expected to return to their communities in southern Sudan, although few of the resources that are required to support them are in place. The conflict in the south has displaced an estimated four million people within Sudan with about two million killed. It erupted in 1983 when rebels took up arms against authorities based in the north to demand greater autonomy. The peace agreement was reached after more than two years of talks brokered by the regional Inter-governmental Authority on Development and hosted by Kenya. In Darfur, which has been described by the UN as the world's worst humanitarian crisis, about 2.3 million people are reliant on aid to survive - more than a third of Darfur's total population. Approximately 1.85 million people have been displaced from their homes, of whom, 200,000 have fled into Chad.