Khartoum to maintain humanitarian dialogue with the US

Humanitarian Aid Commissioner Dr Sulaf al-Din Salih has said Sudan and the US have agreed to open channels for continuing negotiations “away from political interference” in order to address differences between the two in the humanitarian field, AFP reported on 21 July. Salih, who led talks with US Special Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan Andrew Natsios during his recent visit, said the two sides had also “agreed on conducting joint field programmes in the humanitarian sphere”, and to have US human rights organisations visit Sudan “to work with their Sudanese counterparts to reach a unified position and implement positive programmes related to human rights”, the report said. Salih said Natsios’s delegation had raised concern about alleged shelling of civilian targets in the south, and relief agencies’ difficulty getting access to areas of the south in need of humanitarian assistance. Khartoum had asked the US to back peace programmes and a proposed comprehensive ceasefire, and to offer balanced humanitarian assistance to both government- and rebel-held areas, AFP added.

On returning to Kenya after his visit to Sudan, Natsios said he wished to see concrete evidence of improvement, and not just words from Khartoum. “The Sudanese [government] likes to have dialogue. They like... to issue statements and, frequently, what is in those statements doesn’t happen,” he told reporters. “We are more interested in what happens in the field,” he said of the US administration, “because no-one can eat public statements; they eat food”. He said there would soon be an assessment of the prospects for the October harvest to see whether more aid would be required, particularly in the worst-hit areas like Northern Darfur [in the west] and the Red Sea hills [in the east].