Gov’t still denying humanitarian crisis despite international pressure

Sudanese authorities are continuing to deny the existence of a humanitarian crisis and ongoing militia attacks on civilians in western Sudan’s Darfur region despite increasing pressure from the international community. Sudanese Humanitarian Affairs Minister Ibrahim Mahmud Hamid told reporters on Wednesday in Al-Fashir, the capital of Northern Darfur State, that problems in the region were "getting smaller". "The humanitarian situation in Sudan is getting better," he said, adding that enough humanitarian aid was available in the area. "What [aid] is now present is enough, even [until] past the rainy season." While there were still some problems affecting the transport of aid, by June about 90 percent of people in Northern Darfur and 100 percent in Western Darfur had been reached, he said. The Sudanese interior minister and government’s special representative for Darfur, Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Husayn, said the Janjawid militia had been disarmed in Northern Darfur, and that only rebels were attacking civilians and violating the 8 April ceasefire. "It happened [disarmament]," he told IRIN. "It happened in this state, especially in Northern Darfur State. The last attack by the Janjawid happened on the 26 February. Since that time, there is not a single attack by the Janjawid." But aid workers and the United Nations paint a very different picture of the situation. Describing people living in "sub-human standards" in Darfur, UN Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian affairs Jan Egeland said the crisis was "one of the biggest logistical nightmares in the history of humanitarian crises". Currently, 300 international aid workers were working in Darfur, including 50 from UN agencies, but between 900 and 1,000 were actually needed, he said. Of about 130 "IDP [internally displaced person] concentrations" only about 80 have been accessed, according to Egeland. The UN said last week that there were still "colossal gaps" in humanitarian assistance. Significant areas had never received any aid at all, 17 months into the conflict, and many of them happen to be located within rebel-held areas in the north - especially around Tine, Karnoi, and Jabal Marrah north of Al-Halluf. By October, about two million people could be in need of food aid, while malnutrition rates are increasingly on the rise: global acute malnutrition ranges from over 12 percent to 39 percent in conflict-affected areas, according to the UN 90-day action plan for Darfur. Meanwhile, security on the ground has hardly improved. The last aerial attack in Northern Darfur was reported in Thabit in mid-May, well after the signing of the ceasefire, but Janjawid attacks are ongoing and people are still fleeing their homes to urban areas, according to UN officials. "There has been no improvement in security," commented one aid worker. IDPs MOVED IN ADVANCE OF VISIT On Thursday, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan visited Zamzam "camp", during which he spoke with aid workers, tribal leaders and a women’s group. He was supposed to visit Meshtel, a makeshift gathering point for IDPs about five kilometres outside Al-Fashir, which both local authorities and aid workers say is totally unsuitable for them to stay as it is in a wadi - dry river bed - and will flood badly when the rains start. Annan, however, found that the IDPs had been moved before his delegation arrived. The previous evening, several thousand people (about 1,000 families) had reportedly been "moved" by local authorities from Meshtel, just hours ahead of the planned visit. Aid workers felt local authorities did not want Annan to see the filthy conditions and total lack of services there. "We did not like seeing people evacuated the evening before the delegation came," Egeland told reporters. The IDPs were apparently moved to nearby Abu Shawk camp, home to 40,000 other displaced people. "That is one camp that should not be bigger - it’s too big already. So we’ll have to investigate this," said Egeland. Abu Shawk camp, also outside al-Fashir, which US Secretary of State Colin Powell visited on Wednesday, had been "a circus" for about two weeks, an aid worker told IRIN. About 500 people were brought into the camp for the event, apparently to pretend that they were IDPs, IRIN was told, while a new chairman was suddenly chosen and numerous police appeared. To protect the IDPs from intimidation, aid workers were advising high-profile delegations to talk to them in open public spaces, he added. Following a recent visit by Hilary Benn, the British secretary of state for international development, IDPs who had spoken with him in their homes - where they are easily identifiable - were reportedly "interviewed" by national security officers, according to the aid worker. GOVERNMENT WARNED OF POSSIBLE SECURITY COUNCIL RESOLUTION Annan and Powell, both of whom visited northern Darfur this week, both emphasised the need for improved security in Darfur. "I’m in discussions with the government to make sure there is security so that you can go home," Annan told a women’s group in Zamzam. On Wednesday he reportedly told Sudanese ministers that he wanted to see progress within the next 24 to 48 hours. Powell said on Wednesday he had given the Sudanese government a specific time-frame within which it was expected to take action to rein in the Janjawid and allow humanitarian aid into the region. At the end of his 24-hour visit to Sudan, he told reporters that the international community expected specific and tangible measures to be taken within a matter of days and weeks. "We made it clear that in order for the international community to be assured that these things would happen, it was important that we have a time-frame, and specific actions to be taken within that time-frame," Powell said. If the government reneged on its promises, the international community would consider a UN resolution on Darfur. "That will always be a possibility unless the kind of performance we have discussed here today and the kind of commitments that the minister has mentioned to you are actually executed," he said. CONFLICT MAY CONTINUE FOR YEARS In response to the visitors and unusual media presence in Darfur, the interior minister said on Thursday that his "main duties" were to secure and protect the people of Darfur either in their camps or in their villages, to ensure that humanitarian aid reached all areas of Darfur and to "secure the villages" so that people could return home. He said he was deploying 6,000 policemen to maintain security "everywhere", and that he would disarm the Janjawid. "We will disarm them, we will try them so we can protect the people," he said. In a joint press conference with Powell, Foreign Minister Mustafa Uthman Isma'il said that "in the coming few days" his government would concentrate "more and more" on three issues: the lifting of any restrictions on humanitarian aid by "fast-tracking" equipment; enhancing the speed of political negotiations with Darfur’s two rebel groups; and the provision of security in Darfur through the deployment of police and armed forces. But aid workers working in Darfur question both the government’s sincerity and its ability to disarm the militias. "How do you actually do it once you have given them weapons?" asked one aid worker. "It is close to impossible," he said, given the size of Darfur - as big as France - and the geographical spread of the militias. "If you have a man with a gun and power and you ask him to surrender his arms - what’s the net gain for that person?" the aid worker said. Some of the Janjawid have been incorporated into the army, police forces and the paramilitary Popular Defence Forces, according to UN workers, and the same forces are being asked to "protect" the IDPs. Aid workers fear that instead of bringing the Janjawid to justice for atrocities committed, this process may continue, allowing them to continue to act with impunity. The army has also been implicated in coordinated attacks on civilians, according to human rights groups and witnesses. The Sudanese government denies that charge. The IDPs themselves are in no doubt about what they are scared of. Kulthum, a displaced woman in Zamzam, said: "I am scared to go back. I am scared of helicopters, Janjawid and Antonovs [aircraft used by the government forces]." Egeland told reporters: "If we cannot disarm these groups, this will go on for ever. So these next months are really the moment of truth for Darfur and for Sudan, and we have to hold the authorities to their promise that indeed the armed groups will be demobilised, disarmed and brought under control." "This will be a crisis for years to come. It will not be easy to get people to go back [to their homes]," he warned.