The Sudanese government appeared to bow to international pressure on Monday night and postponed its planned expulsion of senior staff at two British aid agencies, Save the Children and Oxfam.
Sudan claimed they had breached the law by making political statements about the crisis in Darfur.
After a day of intense diplomatic activity, the state minister for humanitarian affairs, Muhammad Yousif Abdalla, said a decision on the expulsion had been delayed until after he returns from a trip to Europe in four or five days.
But despite the temporary reprieve, he warned that the organisations’ future in Sudan was still under review. ”The government of Sudan has made it clear that they have to work on the basis of humanitarian grounds and not to take sides,” he said.
In letters to the agencies on Monday morning, Abdel Khaliq al-Hussein, acting head of the Sudan humanitarian affairs commission, a government body that oversees aid agencies, had said: ”It has been decided to consider you persona non grata for the management of your organisation in Sudan. Therefore, you must leave the country within 48 hours.”
The Save the Children programme director for Sudan, Kate Haiff, was still in the country on Monday night.
The British Foreign Office said its ambassador to Khartoum, William Patey, held late-night talks with the Sudanese government. The UN representative to Sudan, Jan Pronk, also made a plea on behalf of the two agencies.
The government is vulnerable to outside pressure. It is under intense scrutiny from the United Nations security council and anxious to avoid providing any excuse that might prompt the body to impose sanctions or increase the size of the international monitoring force.
Relations between aid agencies and the Sudanese government have been strained since Darfur hit the headlines in the spring. More than a million people have been forced to flee their homes for camps, mainly after attacks by the Janjaweed guerrillas backed by the army.
The Sudanese government was slow to hand out visas for the aid agencies. It also monitors comments from the agencies, which are usually careful what they say about conditions on the ground.
The present row follows a Save the Children press release last week in which it claimed there had been an aerial attack by the government on the town of Tawillah, in north Darfur, including a bomb which landed 50 metres from a Save the Children feeding centre.
The press release contained a quote from Toby Porter, director of emergencies at Save the Children, saying that ”innocent civilians, particularly women and children, are suffering at the hands of the rebels and their own government, and still the international community fails to protect them”.
The commission said that the press release had breached Sudanese law and that Save the Children had failed to make a distinction between the rebels and the government, which was on hand to protect civilians.
The commission said that ”this kind of behaviour violates the emergency work law in Sudan and it [the government] will not allow these violations to continue”.
The government referred to two press releases by Oxfam, one on November 19 which criticised a UN security council resolution for weakness on Darfur, and another on November 22 which called on the EU to put pressure on Sudan to stop the violence.
The commission claimed such press statements encouraged the rebels to continue with the war.
The commission said: ”Rejecting the resolutions of the UN security council that call for peace realisation in Sudan simply means that organisation wants the continuation of war in Darfur.” – Guardian Unlimited Â