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WFP to cut rations in Darfur

— Photo: AP

Highlighting a crisis: Hundreds of protesters raise their painted hands in London calling for the end of crisis in Darfur recently.

The World Food Programme is to halve food rations for up to three million people in Darfur from next month because of insecurity along the main supply routes. At least 60 WFP lorries have been hijacked since December in Sudan’s western province, where government forces and rebels have been at war for five years. The hijackings have drastically curtailed the delivery of food to warehouses ahead of the rainy season that lasts from May to September, when there is limited market access and crop stocks are depleted.

Instead of the normal 500 gms of cereal a day, people in displaced persons’ camps and conflict-affected villages will only get 225 gms from next month, the U.N. agency said on Thursday. Rations of pulses and sugar will also be halved, giving people barely 60 per cent of their recommended minimum daily calorie intake.

The WFP said that while Sudan’s government provided security for convoys on the main supply routes, the escorts were too infrequent, given the huge demand for food at this time of year.

Thirty nine hijacked lorries and 26 drivers are still missing. More than 90 vehicles belonging to other aid agencies have also been hijacked this year, with some drivers forced to work for the combatants.

Humanitarian compounds are also increasingly at risk. On a single night this month robberies were reported at nine U.N. and aid agency compounds in El Fasher, the main town in north Darfur.

Oxfam said on Thursday that the attacks and banditry were “critically affecting the entire humanitarian response” at a time when people were still being displaced from their homes by the fighting.

It had been hoped that the hybrid U.N.-African Union peacekeeping force in Darfur, which took over from the purely African force on January 1, would help to improve the security situation. But only 9,600 of the 26,000 peacekeepers are in place, due to disagreements with the Khartoum government over the make-up and duties of the operation, coupled with U.N. bureaucratic delays. Meanwhile, government forces continue to mount air and ground offensives in areas controlled by the Justice and Equality Movement and a Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) faction headed by Abdul Wahid al-Nur, while the rebels have stepped up ambushes of army convoys.

Pro-government Arab “Janjaweed” militias, who at the start of the conflict in 2003 were enlisted to lead attacks on villages deemed sympathetic to the rebels, have added to the instability. Angry at not being paid by the government, the militias went on looting and killing sprees in main market towns such as El Fasher, Kebkabiya and Tawila in recent weeks. The attacks reportedly prompted elements within an SLA branch led by Minni Minnawi, which signed a peace agreement with President Omar al-Bashir in 2006, to distance themselves from the government by deploying fighters to defend traders from their Zaghawa tribe against the Arab raiders.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said on Wednesday he was “extremely disappointed at the lack of progress on all fronts” in Darfur.

“The parties appear determined to pursue a military solution; the political process [has] stalled, the deployment of Unamid is progressing very slowly ... and the humanitarian situation is not improving. The primary obstacle is the lack of political will among all the parties to pursue a peaceful solution to the crisis.” — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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