U.N. Said Not Protecting Sudan Refugees

U.N. Said Not Protecting Sudan Refugees

NewsMax Wires
Saturday, Nov. 27, 2004

GENEVA -- The United Nations is failing to protect millions of people displaced by conflict in Sudan's Darfur region and violence in other hotspots around the world, a U.N. report said Friday.

The world body's approach to the problem of people who have fled their homes but not crossed any international borders "is still largely ad hoc and driven more by the personalities and convictions of individuals on the ground than by an institutional, systemwide agenda," the report said.

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The U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, compiled the 102-page study.

Dennis McNamara, head of OCHA's refugee division, said there is no single U.N. agency that deals with providing assistance for the 25 million internally displaced people around the world.

More than 1.8 million people are estimated to have been driven from their homes in the 21-month-old Darfur conflict.

The war began when rebel groups took up arms against Sudan's Arab-dominated government for what they saw as years of state neglect and discrimination against the region's African tribal population. The government responded by backing Arab militias that have been accused of targeting civilians in a campaign of murder, rape and arson.

International agencies estimate that since March, disease, malnutrition and clashes among the displaced have killed more than 70,000 people. Many more have died in the fighting, but no firm estimate of the direct war toll exists.

Three different U.N. agencies have staff in Darfur, but their access to the displaced and their activity there have frequently been limited because Sudan's government has at times been reluctant to allow outside involvement, McNamara said.

The Sudanese government is allowing the United Nations access to camps in Darfur, but U.N. activity is still limited by a lack of staff and funding. That shortage means the world body has been unable to provide AIDS tests and psychological counseling for rape victims in Darfur's camps, which McNamara called unacceptable.

McNamara said people displaced by fighting in conflict zones in Colombia and northern Uganda are also not getting the U.N. help they need.

"Darfur is only the most dramatic and highly publicized example," McNamara said. "It is by no means the biggest or the longest-lasting."

In a separate conflict in the south of Sudan, where warring parties are striving to reach a peace accord after two decades of fighting, there may be up to three times as many internally displaced people as in Darfur, he said.

Northern Uganda has three times as many internal refugees as Darfur, and an estimated 20,000 of them have been abducted for military service or work as sex slaves, McNamara said.

There are also up to 3 million internally displaced in Congo, and a further 2 million to 3 million in Colombia, he said.

Editor's note:

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