By Lydia Polgreen
New York Times
Published: April 29, 2006
KHARTOUM, Sudan, April 28 - The World Food Program, the United Nations agency responsible for feeding three million people affected by the conflict in the Sudanese region of Darfur, announced today that it would cut in half the amount of food it distributes there because it is short of money.
The food program said it had received just one-third of the $746 million it requested from donor nations for all of its operations in Sudan. As a result, individual rations of grain, beans, oil, sugar and salt for people in Darfur, where a brutal ethnic and political conflict has raged since 2003, will be halved, from 2,100 calories a day to 1,050.
In recent days, Bush administration officials have repeatedly noted that the United States provides 85 percent of the food aid for the millions displaced in Darfur.
The cuts come amid deepening turmoil in Darfur, where several rebel movements are battling government forces and their allied militias in an increasingly chaotic conflict that has killed more than 200,000 people.
Rebels from largely non-Arab tribes agitating for greater autonomy for the region accuse the government of arming local Arab militias, known in Darfur as janjaweed, and setting them upon non-Arab villages to slaughter and pillage as an anti-insurgency tactic. The government denies backing the militias or attacking civilians, though the United States says it has evidence of such support, and aid workers say they have seen government aircraft attacking rebel positions.
Peace talks between the rebels and the government aimed at ending the conflict continued in Abuja, Nigeria, closing in on an April 30 deadline set by the United Nations and the African Union, which is overseeing the talks.
African Union negotiators drafted a proposed settlement that would include some wealth and power sharing and presented it to the various factions on Tuesday.
Since then, rebels and government officials have been talking face to face for the first time, though top officials have yet to meet to discuss it. Today, one of the three main rebel factions said it was dissatisfied with the proposed agreement and therefore could not meet the April 30 deadline. The others, including the largest faction, said they would try to meet it.
President Bush said today: "We urge the rebels, as well as the government, to forge a consensus at Abuja, so that there is a way forward from this."
Earlier today, Washington police officers briefly arrested several members of Congress who were among 100 people protesting loudly outside the Sudanese Embassy.
Even if a peace agreement is reached, splintering among the main rebel factions, the Sudanese Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement, make it unclear whether peace will hold.
Meanwhile, the carnage in Darfur mounts. About 200,000 people have been driven from their homes in a surge of fighting since January, according to aid officials here. Many of the newly displaced are beyond the reach of aid agencies, which find themselves increasingly hemmed in by attacks from both rebel groups and militias allied with the government.
"The situation for humanitarian workers and the United Nations has never been as bad as it is now," said one senior aid official here who requested anonymity because aid agencies that have spoken out have been targeted for harassment and expulsion. "The space for us to work is just getting smaller and smaller."
The attacks have become so brazen and the impunity so great, the official said, that militants who steal cars from aid agencies in Darfur do not even bother to remove the decals from the vehicles before filling them with armed men.
"You start wondering, 'what will it take?' " the official said. "How bad does it have to get before the international community acts?"
The United Nations is formulating plans to send a large peacekeeping force to replace the 7,000 African Union troops struggling to enforce a much-violated cease-fire agreement in Darfur, but Sudan has said it opposes a United Nations operation unless a peace pact is reached.
On Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council approved sanctions against four Sudanese men - one government soldier and three militants from different warring factions, both pro and antigovernment.
Sudanese officials said the sanctions sent the wrong message to the warring parties. Aspokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jamal Ibrahim, told the state news agency that he "considered the resolution as a negative signal that doesn't help in supporting the efforts which are being exerted for reaching peace in Abuja."
In South Darfur, where the Sudan Liberation Army, one of the main rebel groups, holds large swaths of territory, villages are bracing for a new attacks. Human Rights Watch, citing eyewitness reports, said that government troops attacked Joghana, a rebel-occupied village,, with helicopter gunships and Antonov planes on April 24.
Some 80,000 civilians have massed in nearby Gereida, fleeing fighting between government forces, rebels and janjaweed militants, and a government push to clear out rebels in the region could endanger those civilians, the rights group said.
Unicef said earlier this week that malnutrition rates for children in Darfur are rising, with a 20 percent increase in admissions to feeding centers for severely malnourished children since January. Like the World Food Program, Unicef is in a money crunch in Sudan. It has received just $15 million of the $89 million it requested from donors.
Last year, malnutrition rates were cut in half, hundreds of thousands of children were sent to school and mortality reduced, said Ted Chaiban, Unicef's director in Sudan, but with the food program's rations being cut just as the rains begin, more children are bound to die.
Other aid groups are struggling to keep their operations going. On April 15, the government of Sudan ordered the Norwegian Refugee Council to leave Kalma, a vast camp that is home to 90,000 people displaced by the conflict in South Darfur. The council coordinated the activities of about two dozen agencies working in the camp, but Sudan declined to renew the agency's contract for reasons that were never fully explained.
Last week the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator, Jan Egeland, told reporters in New York that the situation has deteriorated so quickly that "it's a matter of weeks or months that we will have a collapse in many of our operations" in Darfur.
In a statement from Geneva, James Morris, director of the World Food Program, said that while international development aid has doubled in the last few years, not enough is getting to Darfur.
International donors "are not putting victims of humanitarian crises like Darfur first on their list," Mr. Morris said.
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