Envoy contests draft UN resolution on IDPs

Action on a draft United Nations resolution on protection of and assistance to internally displaced people (IDPs) stalled on Wednesday after Sudan expressed concern that the UN Secretary-General's Special Representative on IDPs, Francis Deng, had drawn details on Sudan from a database which included information provided by the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A) in southern Sudan, as well as by organisations the government said were operating illegally in Sudan. Ilham Ibrahim Muhammad Ahmad, Sudan's delegate to the UN General Assembly's Third Committee (Social, Humanitarian and Cultural), said that a footnote in the draft resolution referring to the database should be deleted. Ahmad said her country had worked with others in offering amendments which could have led to consensus, but that none if these were taken into consideration. Sudan, with all due respect and appreciation to the Special Representative on IDPs, had asked for discussions and comments on his proposals, she said. Therefore, Sudan did not consider itself obliged to support the resolution. Deng had visited Sudan recently and met senior government officials, but, while reading the part of the report concerning Sudan, officials had been surprised to learn that the database on which he relied had "included information provided by the rebellion movement in the south, as well as organisations operating illegally in Sudan," Ahmad said. Most relief organisations working in SPLM/A-held areas of southern Sudan have been operating on the basis of documents issued by the rebel movement, which are not recognised by the government. The Khartoum government maintains that such organisations - a small number of whom have become closely associated with the rebel movement in the public eye - are operating in Sudan illegally, since it has never issued visa or work documents. In recent months, Khartoum has been trying to ensure that the UN and international aid agencies apply to it for visas for staff working anywhere in Sudan, and negotiations are ongoing. Addressing the Third Committee on Wednesday, Ahmad said Sudan also deeply regretted that Deng's report on IDPs did not include any governmental source, since there was plenty of information and figures available on the protection of IDPs. While Norway, a co-sponsor of the draft resolution, agreed to strike out the footnote referring to the IDP database, Ahmad said text references to the database should also be dropped. Norway (a keen advocate of humanitarian intervention for IDPs, and which has supported the Norwegian Refugee Council's Global IDP database project, http://www.db.idpproject.org/), declined to drop references to the database, saying there had been two open informal consultations on the resolution, the text had been discussed, and the reference to the database should not be deleted. The matter was postponed until the differences could be resolved. At the start of the Third Committee meeting, Bacre Ndiaye (Director of the New York office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, UNHCHR) had read a statement on behalf of Deng, who was unable to participate due to illness. He highlighted the fact that refugee law was not directly applicable to IDPs, despite the fact that they were often forced to leave their homes and found themselves in refugee-like situations, because international law defined refugees as persons who had fled across international borders. However, because of the similarity of their situations, certain provisions of refugee law were useful to a certain extent in formulating guidelines to assist IDPs, Ndiaye added. Deng incorporated some of these in the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement presented to UNHCHR in 1998, which have since been the basis of statements and resolutions by governments and the General Assembly. Ahmad said on Tuesday (27 November), when the draft resolution on IDPs was introduced to the Third Committee, that the draft mentioned the International Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, and all delegations were aware that those recommendations could not be considered mandatory or binding, because they had not been subject to negotiations within an intergovernmental framework, with the participation of all states and the United Nations community. Asked about Deng's information-gathering on IDPs, Ndiaye noted that the Special Representative had visited about 25 countries around the world, and had met officials from central and local governments, representatives of international organisations, international and local NGOs, representatives of civil society and those of internally displaced communities. In his report, Deng had used a wide range of sources of information, "including governmental, intergovernmental and nongovernmental sources, as well as scholarly and research institutions in countries throughout the world," Ndiaye added. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan reported on Sudan in October that the UN and its humanitarian partners "remain strongly committed to assisting an estimated 4 million IDPs countrywide, and to facilitating longer-term solutions in the current context of endemic conflict". IDPs were particularly concentrated in the Khartoum area, he added. In 1999, the UN estimated the distribution of IDPs within government-controlled areas as: some 1.8 million IDPs in Khartoum State, 500,000 in the east and the transition zone (between and overlapping government-held areas in the north and rebel-held areas in the south), and 300,000 in the southern states, according to the Sudan profile on the Global IDP Database. The latest comprehensive estimate for the southern sector dated back to a USAID survey in 1994, which confirmed the presence of 1.5 million IDPs, it added. The estimated figure of 4 million IDPs means Sudan has the largest displaced population in the world, though the complexity and fluidity of the IDP situation in rebel-held areas, inadequate information about the situation in the transition area, and disagreement as to the displacement effects associated with oil production make it difficult to pin down the exact number countrywide. Assessments of the IDP situation are further complicated by nomadic migration patterns in some areas, as well as movements related to people searching for emergency humanitarian assistance in the face of drought, flooding and other crisis situations.