Oxfam could withdraw from Sudan’s violent Darfur region if security worsens, with attacks on its staff there hindering one of the aid agency’s largest operations, its country director said on Monday.
Caroline Nursey, who has worked in Sudan for four years, also said the crisis in Darfur had drained donor money from other areas of Sudan in desperate need of development.
”It’s certainly a strong possibility that if things get any worse Oxfam would have to withdraw,” she told Reuters in an interview.
”Oxfam is operating at the limits of what it can tolerate as an organisation. In most circumstances if the security situation were as bad as it is in Darfur we would withdraw.”
”The only reason we are still there is that we are aware of very large numbers of people who are totally dependent on us for services,” said Nursey, who is due to leave her post in Sudan at the end of this week.
Oxfam provides water and sanitation to 500 000 people in Darfur and neighbouring Chad, where the conflict has spilled across the border.
Oxfam withdrew from Gereida camp in South Darfur, home to the largest population of displaced Darfuris, after coordinated attacks on aid agencies last December, and from Saraf Umra in North Darfur after a driver was kidnapped and killed.
Two weeks ago an Oxfam vehicle was taken in broad daylight by armed men in South Darfur’s massive and volatile Kalma camp. Nursey said the driver overheard the men debating whether to kill the two Oxfam staff members.
The world’s largest aid operation is helping four million people in Darfur, a region the size of France where mostly non-Arab rebels are fighting government forces.
Insurgents accuse Khartoum of neglecting the remote, arid region. But Nursey said pre-conflict Darfur was better off than Sudan’s east, after almost a decade of low-level conflict, and the war-torn south, emerging from decades of civil war.
”The figures for poverty are very much worse in the east,” Nursey said. ”Darfur pre-conflict was a pretty good area and even now in most of the camps the actual nutritional levels are better than they are in rural areas in the east.”
No peace dividend
Nursey said the three regional peace deals Khartoum has signed in two years — for the south, the east and in Darfur — had not reduced poverty in those areas. Sudan’s west remains deep in conflict.
Nursey said donors’ focus on Darfur had left less cash for development in the rest of the country.
”In terms of funding, donors are pouring such a huge amount of money into Darfur because they have to save lives, but it does have an impact on the money they may put elsewhere.”
”Where donors have not been happy with government policies in relation to Darfur it’s also discouraged them from putting longer-term development money into Sudan,” she added.
She said donors needed to work harder with the government of southern Sudan to provide rural development and education, health, and infrastructure services to hundreds of thousands of people returning home to the region after years of war.
Nursey said she was optimistic for Sudan’s future if the needs of the majority were taken into account.
Sudan produces more than 500 000 barrels per day of oil and the disparity between wealth in the capital Khartoum and outlying areas is stark.
”For there to be success in Sudan in the future we need to make sure that the interests of poor people are taken into account across the whole of the country and the people of Sudan need to work together to achieve that,” Nursey said. – Reuters