UN envoy urges halt to Darfur fighting so children can be vaccinated

The UN Secretary-General's envoy to Sudan, Jan Pronk, has urged parties to the conflict in the western region of Darfur to suspend hostilities so that a three-day campaign to vaccinate nearly six million children against polio can take place safely. Pronk told a news conference in Khartoum on Monday that he would approach the Sudanese government and rebel groups in Darfur to urge them to observe "three days of tranquillity" during the immunisation scheme, which is due to begin on 10 January, UN News Service reported. He said that the call to suspend hostilities was necessary because both sides had only been "paying lip service" to a ceasefire they signed earlier in a bid to end the two-year conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives and displaced more than 1.85 million people. "And that means no action whatsoever," he said. "That means that all forces should stay in the camps, in the barracks - not outside - not hampering any humanitarian action to reach the people, in order to stop polio - to stop a devastating attack on the people of Sudan." Helped by some 40,000 volunteers, the UN World Health Organization (WHO), UN Children's Fund, non-governmental organisations and the Sudanese health ministry plan to vaccinate 5.9 million children - or every child under the age of five - across Africa's largest country. Two further doses of the polio vaccine will then be administered at six-week intervals in February and April. The series of national immunisation days have been introduced because WHO statistics reveal that Sudan had 105 identified cases of polio in 2004, the third highest in the world after Nigeria and India. Cases were reported in 17 of Sudan's 26 states and 40 were discovered in Khartoum alone. Pronk said the problem was particularly urgent because so many Sudanese have moved around their country in recent years, making it difficult for health workers to determine exactly who has and who has not been vaccinated. The country's current winter means the polio virus is also less active now than it will be during the hotter months. WHO's Representative in Sudan, Salah El-Haithami, told the same press conference that the recent incident reported from Saudi Arabia - of a confirmed polio infection in a Sudanese child living there - showed how rapidly the virus can spread. Sudan's recent outbreak began in May 2004, when the nation's first cases were reported in more than three years. The outbreak was traced to northern Nigeria, where vaccinations were suspended in mid-2003 amid concerns from local religious leaders about the safety of the oral vaccine. Those concerns were proven to be baseless and the vaccinations have resumed there, but polio infections have now been reported in at least 13 countries in the region. Meanwhile, the UN Advance Mission in Sudan (UNAMIS) reported fresh indications of fighting on Monday in Darfur between Sudanese government forces and members of the Sudan Liberation Army (SLA), one of the rebel groups. Government helicopter gunships were reported to have fired rockets at Sayah, a stronghold of the SLA in North Darfur state. The number of casualties was unclear. Armed bandits are also reported to have attacked commercial buses and trucks across all three of Darfur's states.