Sudan
Aid resumes but relief efforts still held hostage

afrol.com, 18 August - UN humanitarian relief flights to southern Sudan resumed yesterday after an eight-day suspension, but serious concerns remain about whether the UN's Operation Lifeline Sudan (OLS) can survive much longer in the face of the Sudanese government's persistent strategy of deliberate aerial bombings, aid blockages, bureaucratic restrictions, and broken promises. 

OLS is a special aid program to Sudan involving three dozen UN and private international aid agencies. Although aid deliveries have resumed, U.S. and UN policy makers should not rest easy. The viability of OLS remains in serious jeopardy. 

Yesterday's welcomed resumption of aid flights does not change the fact that the Sudanese government still denies OLS access to many locations in dire need, particularly in Western Upper Nile Province where new population displacement is heaviest. Sudanese authorities continue to suggest that some international aid agencies are virtual enemies of the state and that an essential OLS base camp in northwest Kenya should be closed. Sudanese officials have signaled a desire to impose new and presumably tighter clearance procedures on each OLS relief flight. 

The eight-day suspension of OLS aid flights, forced by nearly 40 aerial bombings of civilian and humanitarian targets by Sudanese government planes during a five-week period-including patently deliberate bombings of international relief planes while on the ground-was merely the latest tactic in the Sudanese government's arsenal to disrupt international efforts to deliver food to needy populations in southern Sudan. The government's outright ban on all relief flights to a stricken province in 1998 triggered a famine that killed tens of thousands. 

It is noteworthy that the Sudanese government's attacks and harassment of OLS efforts this year have occurred in the middle of southern Sudan's annual "hunger gap" period, when local farmers' food stocks are lowest prior to harvests. Throughout the 11-year history of OLS, Sudanese authorities have barred international aid to key locations at critical moments. 

The UN resumed aid flights yesterday based on assurances from the Sudanese government that bombings of relief operations will cease. 

"The resumption of aid flights is welcomed, but let's not kid ourselves," said Roger Winter, executive director of the U.S. Committee for Refugees (USCR). "What good are the Sudanese government's promises when OLS flights previously approved by authorities in Khartoum were bombed; when flights previously cleared by Khartoum have been blocked; and when Khartoum's explicit promise on April 19 to end all bombings of humanitarian targets only led to intensified bombings of those same targets in July and early August?" 

It is only a matter of time before Sudanese officials take another round of steps to disrupt or irreparably cripple OLS. UN and U.S. officials should be prepared to declare the entirety of southern Sudan a "special humanitarian zone" with automatic rights of access for all life-saving humanitarian efforts. 

"As long as the government of Sudan maintains ultimate control over OLS relief operations," Winter warned, "Sudanese people who could have been saved will be allowed to die, and OLS will always be one day away from complete collapse." 

An estimated 2 million people have died in Sudan's civil war since 1983. More than 4 million Sudanese are internally displaced, and some 300,000 are refugees in neighboring countries. Sudan is currently producing more uprooted people than any other country on earth. One of every nine uprooted people worldwide is Sudanese.

Source: US Committee for Refugees

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