World must act on Darfur situation, urges Egeland

Millions of people are at risk of starvation unless the international community acts quickly on the situation in the war-torn western Sudanese region of Darfur, Jan Egeland, the UN's emergency relief coordinator, said. "Some are predicting four million, some are predicting - that [more] people [are] in desperate need of life-saving assistance as we approach the hunger gap in mid-year," Egeland told a news conference in New York on Friday. "We did prevent the massive famine that many predicted, but I think now its time to say we may perhaps not be able to do so in the coming months if the situation keeps on deteriorating," UN News reported him as saying. Continued violence in Darfur, he added, was seriously hampering aid efforts in the region. "Aid workers have been killed, our helicopters have been shot at, our trucks are being looted there, we are paralysed," Egeland noted. "We could have provided daily bread for more than two million people. We are, at best, giving to 1.5 million. This cannot continue." He commended the humanitarian community - the UN, NGOs, the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies - for their role in providing relief to the vulnerable of Darfur. He noted that there were about 9,000 aid workers on the ground, with close to 1,000 being international. "Our staff on the ground is really working round the clock and are burning themselves out faster than anywhere else that I've seen in recent memory," he said. Noting that the UN had received just half of the US $650 million pledged for the region, Egeland called for a tsunami-style increase in relief to Darfur, a reference to the massive international mobilisation of aid for those affected by the Indian Ocean tsunami last December. However, he warned, relief aid alone was insufficient. The international community had to take further action to end the ongoing massacres, he added. He called for a four- to five-fold increase in the African Union monitoring force in Darfur, for robust mediation and for more pressure to be brought to bear on government, rebels, ethnic and local leaders who "take those positions that lead to [the] massive killing of women and children". Urging members of the UN Security Council to set aside their differences on Darfur for the sake of resolving the conflict, Egeland said: "Too often the world sends us - the band-aid - and the world believes that we keep people alive and then they don't have to take a political [or] security action." The conflict in Darfur, which broke out in 2003, pits the Sudanese government and militias, allegedly allied to it, against rebels opposed to what they call the marginalisation and discrimination of the region by the government. The hostilities have seen up to 70,000 killed and up to 1.9 million people displaced from their homes.