U.N. Said Not Protecting Sudan Refugees

article

The United Nations is failing to protect millions of people displaced by conflict in Sudan's Darfur region and violence in other hotspots around the world, a U.N. report said Friday.

The world body's approach to the problem of people who have fled their homes but not crossed any international borders "is still largely ad hoc and driven more by the personalities and convictions of individuals on the ground than by an institutional, systemwide agenda," the report said.

The U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank, compiled the 102-page study.

Dennis McNamara, head of OCHA's refugee division, said there is no single U.N. agency that deals with providing assistance for the 25 million internally displaced people around the world.

More than 1.8 million people are estimated to have been driven from their homes in the 21-month-old Darfur conflict.
[...]
Three different U.N. agencies have staff in Darfur, but their access to the displaced and their activity there have frequently been limited because Sudan's government has at times been reluctant to allow outside involvement, McNamara said.

The Sudanese government is allowing the United Nations access to camps in Darfur...

Actually, the government is blocking access whenever possible, and has forcibly relocated refugee camps with the use of tear gas and guns. One such evacuation happened on the day Sudan signed a cease-fire, and was actually the second such attempt in about two weeks at the camp. Plus, the Sudanese government will not allow the construction of roads to Sudan, thus forcing relief efforts to use incredibly expensive airplanes. The government claims that it wants to build trains, which take years, and would actually be of little use because of the nature of trains compared to hte nature of cars. Trains can move a lot over a long distance, but not distribute supplies because trains can follow only simple tracks; cars can distribute but have difficulty over great distance, because of hte agility of roads and cars. But, that's a bit of off-topic discussion for another time.

I'll continue with the quote (from exactly where left off):
...but U.N. activity is still limited by a lack of staff and funding. That shortage means the world body has been unable to provide AIDS tests and psychological counseling for rape victims in Darfur's camps, which McNamara called unacceptable.

McNamara said people displaced by fighting in conflict zones in Colombia and northern Uganda are also not getting the U.N. help they need.

"Darfur is only the most dramatic and highly publicized example," McNamara said. "It is by no means the biggest or the longest-lasting."

In a separate conflict in the south of Sudan, where warring parties are striving to reach a peace accord after two decades of fighting, there may be up to three times as many internally displaced people as in Darfur, he said.

Northern Uganda has three times as many internal refugees as Darfur, and an estimated 20,000 of them have been abducted for military service or work as sex slaves, McNamara said.

There are also up to 3 million internally displaced in Congo, and a further 2 million to 3 million in Colombia, he said.