Yeah, so. Sudan.
Remember that refugee crisis and civil war they were having around this time last year ... and the year before that?
Plus ça change, plus la même chose...
Twenty-nine people were reported killed in an unprecedented attack on a refugee camp in the northwest of the Sudan region of Darfur, the United Nations said on Thursday. According to initial reports, the Aro Sharow camp was attacked by 250-300 "armed Arab men on horses and camels" late on Wednesday, the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said in a statement. Another 10 people were reported to have been seriously wounded and the nearby village of Gosmeina was also believed to have been attacked and burned, the agency said. The death toll referred only to camp dwellers.
The camp, home to between 4,000 and 5,000 people, lies 16 km (10 miles) north of the town of Saleah in an area that has been regarded as a no-go zone for the U.N. for months because of continuing violence. Nevertheless, this was the first time that a camp had been attacked since fighting broke out in the vast Sudanese region over two years ago forcing hundreds of thousands to flee to the makeshift settlements, the UNHCR said. The U.N. has already warned that it may have to suspend aid operations in Darfur because of a resurgence in violence.
Following the attack, High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres said it was the responsibility of the Sudanese government to restore order. "As long as this insecurity continues, the international community cannot provide the assistance that is so desperately needed by hundreds of thousands of people," Guterres said. "The government of Sudan has a responsibility to ensure security for all its citizens," he added....
Right ... A statement as dense as that makes you wonder if the UN has perhaps not noticed that Sudan is serenely disinterested in providing security to most of its citizens at all -- at least, not the ones living outside Khartoum ... and they're only interested in providing security to Khartoum itself because, you know, the government people live there, and they'd like to keep on living.
Purely a side note: for a certain amount of context, look at the map of Sudan from the Perry-Castaneda collection at the University of Texas. While we tend to speak of Darfur more as a point, thinking of it as a single town, it's actually a region ... and given the size of Sudan and its internal borders, a fairly large one, at that. Most of the refugees are in Gharb Darfur, shoved over against Chad, but some are spread out into Shamal Darfur and Janub Darfur as well. It's a fairly wide ranging refugee crisis, geographically speaking.
[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]
NAIROBI, 29 Sep 2005 (IRIN) - Continuing violence in the western Sudanese region of Darfur is hindering humanitarian efforts and creating a chaotic situation there, the UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, Jan Egeland, warned on Wednesday. "As we speak, we have had to suspend action in many areas. Tens of thousands of people will not get any assistance today because it is too dangerous, and it could grow," Egeland told a news conference in Geneva, Switzerland. Noting that Darfur was a continuing crisis in spite of very effective humanitarian work, Egeland said the level of violence had escalated sharply in September.
If the violence continued to escalate and it continued to be so dangerous to unarmed humanitarian workers, the UN might not be able to sustain its operations for 2.5 million people requiring life-saving assistance there, he added. [...] The conflict in Darfur pits Sudanese government troops and allied militias like the Janjawid against two main rebel groups, the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A) and the Justice and Equality Movement, which claim to be fighting the marginalisation of their region by the Khartoum-based government. According to the UN, more than 2.9 million people continue to be affected by the conflict, of whom 1.85 million are internally displaced or have fled to neighbouring Chad....
(Sidenote the second: The UN disclaims the provenance of a report it produces itself on a UN-affiliated website. Well. Yes. Quite.)
Sidenote the third: For a somewhat mindblowing comparison, look at the difference between Sudan's population and demographics and those of the United States in the CIA World Factbook. Ignore the population, and look at the rest. Our population is significantly older -- which likely goes some way to explaining Sudan's instability, since having most of the men in your country being around 17 just can't be good -- our population growth rate is noticeably lower, despite a noticeably higher net migration rate, our birth rate is less than half that of Sudan, the sex ratio indicates that Sudan loses a startling number of women during their childbearing years, and Sudan's infant mortality rate is appalling ... but the difference in overall death rate between the countries, one of which is having an intractable civil war, loses lots of women in childbirth, and loses lots of children in infancy, is really rather small. Curious, that.
Posted by iain at September 29, 2005 12:05 PM
