Access denial threatens to worsen humanitarian crisis

A grouping of nine prominent aid agencies working in Sudan on Thursday warned of the potential for a worsening humanitarian crisis in the south of the country as increased conflict and ongoing flight bans have cut off access to hundreds of thousands of people at a critical time.

"All the conditions are in place for a crisis: lots of fighting, no access for humanitarian assistance, and many frightened, hungry, displaced people," said Jeff Seed, Director of CARE International's operations in southern Sudan.

Even before recent outbreaks of fighting and reduced access, human development indicators were already discouraging in southern Sudan, particularly for those affected by war in Unity (Wahdah) State/western Upper Nile, the Nuba Mountains region of Southern Kordofan, northern and western Bahr al-Ghazal, and Eastern Equatoria, according to the UN.

On Thursday, the nine aid NGOs called on the warring parties in Sudan to guarantee periods of tranquillity during which fighting would be suspended to allow safe access to affected populations. Such periods and zones of tranquillity are a key element of confidence-building measures proposed by US special peace envoy, John Danforth.

The organisations also "urged the international community to make clear the extreme urgency of the situation to their Sudanese counterparts and to press for immediate humanitarian access".

In addition to CARE, the aid agencies which joined the urgent call for humanitarian access were: Save the Children, Catholic Relief Services (CRS), International Rescue Committee (IRC), Oxfam, Action Against Hunger (ACF USA), Tearfund, Foundation Amurt and World Vision.

The NGOs highlighted, in particular, the problems of severe fighting and flight bans in three areas of southern Sudan: Bahr el-Ghazal, Eastern Equatoria and western Upper Nile, which have cut off humanitarian access to hundreds of thousands of people.

In Bahr el-Ghazal and western Upper Nile, the flight bans had been in place for as long as three months; in Eastern Equatoria, the ban had been in place for at least three years, Thursday's statement said. On 16 May, the government of Sudan announced a flight ban for the entire area of Unity State, encompassing western Upper Nile.

In southern Sudan, all told, "an area of land roughly the size of France is now off-limits to large-scale relief efforts," according to Thursday's joint statement from NGOs operational there.

"Increased fighting has forced tens of thousands of people to flee their homes at a critical moment - the start of the planting season when crops must be sown to avoid a potentially life-threatening food crisis," it added.

Fighting is raging in Unity State/western Upper Nile between Sudanese government and aligned militia forces, on the one hand, and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLM/A), on the other, essentially over control of the area's rich oil resources. This battle for resources has exacerbated the long-running civil war in Sudan, where basic issues of safety, food security, health and nutrition affect millions of people, according to several human rights organisations.

There are also extensive military engagements in Bahr al-Ghazal -exacerbated, ironically, by the redeployment of forces from the Nuba Mountains, where a local ceasefire agreement is in place - although the approach of the rainy season offers hope that these will soon ease, aid officials told IRIN on Thursday.

Though fighting and the denial of access in large swathes of southern Sudan make it impossible for aid groups to accurately determine the severity of the situation, the information that is available is causing concern; the most recent nutritional surveys conducted by both ACF-USA and Tearfund found global malnutrition rates in children under five years to be more than 20 percent in some areas.

"These results have been reported at the start of the hunger gap [the period between harvests] and this situation can only deteriorate unless action is taken," said Maxine Clayton, head of mission of Action Against Hunger-USA's humanitarian programs. Global malnutrition rates above 15 percent are considered to give serious cause for concern.

The last time aid agencies were cut off from civilians for such an extended period was in 1998, when a flight ban prevented distribution of food and other relief supplies to Bahr el Ghazal for four consecutive months, according to the NGOs.

On that occasion, they said, "flight bans, poor climatic conditions and an upsurge in fighting were responsible for a famine that killed at least 70,000 people".

Freedom of access to vulnerable populations - an international humanitarian principle - is guaranteed under a beneficiary protocol of Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS), which established principles for the protection and provision of aid to war-affected populations in Sudan.

Despite repeated calls for unrestricted access and agreements by the warring parties to assure this, military operations, insecurity, flight bans and the government's alleged depopulation of oil-rich areas to secure them for production have displaced and/or precluded access to hundreds of thousands of civilians.

With an estimated 80,000 people displaced from Ruweng County and another 50,000 from Unity State/western Upper Nile in a pattern of depopulation of oil areas by government forces and aligned militias, the government's ban on humanitarian flights "jeopardises the lives of tens of thousands of people", the European Coalition on Oil in Sudan reported earlier this month.

Khartoum denies that is targeting civilian populations in oil areas and has blamed the SPLM/A for escalating military operations and causing the deterioration of humanitarian conditions in Unity/western Upper Nile.

It has also said it will permit land and river corridors for the delivery of relief materials (though aid agencies say relief work would be severely hampered by having such access only, given poor infrastructure and heavy rains), and that it is studying UN proposals "on ways to facilitate conveying humanitarian assistance to the needy," according to the official Sudan News Agency (SUNA).

The United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Sudan, Gerhart Baum, has repeatedly criticised the severely hampered access of vulnerable people to humanitarian aid in parts of southern Sudan - despite the government and the SPLM/A having formally endorsed the principle of unimpeded access to beneficiaries.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan also expressed concern about this in a report to the UN Security Council report in October 2001, when he said it was "paramount to ensure the respect by all signatories" of binding agreements on unrestricted humanitarian access.

"It is especially important for the humanitarian action in critical areas of southern Sudan to benefit from an extension of the humanitarian space and to operate with [at least] minimal security guarantees," he stated. [see
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=12480]

This point was echoed again on Thursday in the combined aid agencies statement on access.

"We desperately need action from leaders on both sides of the conflict in Sudan and in the international community to protect innocent civilians, facilitate the provision of humanitarian assistance, and to achieve a just and lasting peace", said Paul Townsend, country representative for CRS in Sudan.