ECHO warns of continued instability in war-torn Darfur

By David Cronin

Date: 09/09/04

ECHO, the European Commission's humanitarian aid office, estimates that it will take another 18 months before stability is restored to Sudan's war-torn Darfur province.

An ECHO-led fact-finding mission to the western Sudanese region has found that uprooted people sheltering in refugee camps face constant harassment from the Janjaweed, the Arab militia accused of looting and burning African villages.

"I can't see any way out of the crisis in the next 18 months because you have a million homeless people," said an ECHO source. "While I can be hopeful that the health needs of refugees can be met, I can't be hopeful about the security side of things. People across Darfur are scared out of their wits."

At the Fatta Barnu camp in Kutum, northern Darfur, refugees have kept a logbook of the intimidation they encountered from the Janjaweed surrounding the camp. This showed that armed men regularly enter the camp, run by the Spanish Red Cross and Irish relief agency Goal, demand that refugees hand over the few possessions they have and then leave, firing into the air. "These people have nothing and end up with even less," the source added.

ECHO is planning to open an office in Darfur to coordinate its relief activities by the end of this month. It will be headed by Spaniard António Fernandez de Velasco, who has previously worked from Moscow on the humanitarian response to the war in Chechnya.

The office has identified firewood as a major need in the refugee camps because large numbers of women who traditionally gather fuel have been raped while searching for fuel.

The European Parliament is expected to pass a resolution on the situation in Darfur at next week's plenary session in Strasbourg. This follows a visit to Sudan by a delegation from the assembly.

The motion is likely to urge that sanctions, including a visa ban and the freezing of assets, be imposed on the Khartoum government for not complying with a UN demand to disarm the Janjaweed by the end of last month.

But MEPs are unlikely to follow the US Congress in deciding that the killing in Darfur, which has claimed some 50,000 lives since last year, constitutes genocide.

"To define that exactly, you first need to have a legal enquiry," said Emma Bonino, the Italian Radical MEP and former European commissioner for humanitarian affairs.

The general consensus among EU officials dealing with Africa is that it would be premature for the Union formally to condemn the crimes in Darfur as genocidal and insist they be tried as such under international law. "Usually that is something you do at the end of a crisis," said one.

"We are in the middle of this crisis, not at the end of it."

Last weekend, EU foreign ministers announced that they would be willing to send a police mission to Darfur, if asked to do so by the African Union.

As a result of a fact-finding mission to Sudan, the European Union's Humanitarian Aid Office (ECHO), estimates that it will take a long time before stability can be restored in the country's Darfur province.

European Commission: ECHO: ECHO at work: Sudan: The Humanitarian crisis in Greater Darfur, Sudan http://ec.europa.eu/comm/echo/field/sudan/darfur/index_en.htm

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