Fresh attack on North Darfur village reported

Armed men attacked a village in the western Sudanese state of North Darfur on Tuesday forcing about 2,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) to flee from their homes, the medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) reported. "We are not sure who was behind the attack," Wyger Wentholt, MSF regional information officer told IRIN in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi. "What our people on the ground were told by the IDPs was that the attackers were suspected to be a pro-government militia." MSF, which was providing medical care to the displaced civilians at the time of the attack, said many of those who fled were forcibly displaced from their original home villages several days previously and had sought refuge in Saraf Ayat village, 50 km west of the state capital El-Fasher, at the time. "When the MSF team arrived in Saraf Ayat yesterday morning, there were about 1,500 displaced people sheltering in the village," MSF said in a statement. "They had fled their homes three days beforehand, after assaults on 27 November targeted villages north of the town of Tawillah - MSF had just started providing medical assistance when an attack caused both displaced people and residents to flee and forced the MSF team to evacuate." According to MSF, its team was forced to evacuate from another town, Korma, a week earlier because of escalating insecurity. The team had, however, returned to Korma on Sunday "to assess the situation and give medical consultations". "The fact that people are being forced to repeatedly escape from one place to the next and cannot find a secure place of refuge is extremely worrying," Jerome Oberreit of MSF Brussels was quoted as saying in the statement. "Mortality studies carried out by MSF show that during the early phases of the Darfur conflict, the pattern of repeated violence and consequent displacement was the cause of very high mortality [rates]." Meanwhile, the president of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), Jakob Kellenberger, has called for respect of international humanitarian law following a visit to the western Sudanese region of Darfur, the ICRC said. "Kellenberger’s key message was that access to conflict-affected civilians, as well as their security, had to be guaranteed," Marco Jiménez Rodríguez, ICRC spokesperson for Africa, told IRIN on Wednesday from Geneva. "Around two-thirds of the population of Darfur is still living in their own communities," Rodríguez added. "If a deterioration in the security situation forces them to flee their homes too, it will exacerbate the humanitarian crisis." Kellenberger, who spent three days in Darfur, visited the towns of El-Fashir, Kutum and Zalingei. ICRC said he had, however, acknowledged that access to people affected by the conflict had "improved substantially" since his last visit in March 2004. Sudanese troops and rebels of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) clashed just days after the UN Security Council met in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, on 18 and 19 November. The Council adopted a resolution demanding that the government, rebel forces and other armed groups in Darfur cease all violence. On 22 November, Save the Children-UK flew its staff out of Tawillah as a result of fighting in which the SLA took control of the town. The rebels had previously attacked the West Darfur town of El-Geraida, forced the police to leave and raised their flag. Some 50-60 SLA fighters also attacked a police station near Kalma in South Darfur, killing a policeman. Three SLA fighters also died in that event. On Monday, the UN said the clashes had subsided and several thousand IDPs, who had fled their camps, had returned. A team of UN and African Union officials visited Tawillah, where the most intense clashes occurred after government troops took back the town, to assess the situation and try to locate IDPs who had fled their camps. The clashes forced the UN World Food Programme to temporarily suspend its operations, except in the state capital El-Fasher, affecting some 300,000 people. The UN said escalating violence threatened ongoing relief activities, violated recently signed ceasefire accords between the government and rebels, and placed tens of thousands of civilians at risk. Fighting in Darfur started in 2003 when indigenous communities took up arms, accusing Khartoum of decades of neglect and oppression. In its efforts to pacify the region, President Omar El-Bashir’s government is widely believed to have backed the Janjawid, an Arab militia accused of committing atrocities against unarmed civilians. About 1.45 million people have been displaced, while another 200,000 are living as refugees in neighbouring Chad.