IDPs going hungry in Darfur as bandits target aid workers

When I last visited the wartorn Darfur region of Sudan two years ago, Al Salaam camp was a refuge for about 1,000 newly displaced people. Today its population hovers around 60,000.

Aside from the camp’s population, insecurity and the level of despondency have also grown precipitously during these past two years.

Prince Tucker, a World Vision aid worker with whom I served in Darfur two years ago, has been in the vanguard of providing humanitarian assistance to the region’s war-weary communities for four years.

Rampant banditry and carjackings have reduced vast swathes of South Darfur to no-go areas for Tucker, a native of Sierra Leone, and other relief workers. “We are not able to access many areas where our help is sorely needed,” Tucker said. “It’s just not safe to go there.”

The stream of Land Cruisers emblazoned with aid agencies’ acronyms has been reduced to a trickle on the byways of South Darfur.

Exasperated by the upsurge of banditry and stung by carjacking incidents that have become depressingly frequent in the region, most humanitarian organisations now rent private vehicles to access their project sites.

It costs them $150 a day to hire an off-road vehicle. This has sharply increased the cost of delivering aid to Darfur’s hapless hamlets and spawned a vehicle rental cottage industry.

“Some of the vehicles that were stolen from NGOs have come back for rent in the name of private ownership and I have said ‘No’,” said Abraham Hadoto, World Vision’s operations manager in Darfur. “I am not renting any hardtops and any Land Rovers.”

During the past two years, many aid agencies have lost hard-top Toyota Land Cruisers and Land Rovers to militias and bandits who routinely rob, assault and shoot at aid workers in the most dangerous corners of Darfur.

Even troops of the hybrid UN-AU peacekeeping mission in Darfur are falling prey to carjackers and bandits, further casting doubts on their ability to protect civilians and aid workers.

Several trucking firms have pulled their vehicles from the treacherous roads, disrupting the flow of relief food from Port Sudan, the point of entry, to Darfur. Consequently, refugees and displaced people now receive less food rations.

As carjackings and banditry rise so have the humanitarian needs. The number of people receiving monthly food rations in the camps of South Darfur alone has swelled by more than 100,000 over the past two years.

But the soaring needs are meeting with dwindling financial support from despairing donors who are beginning to show signs of compassion fatigue.

Disillusioned by Darfur’s cratered peace process and lack of improvement in the humanitarian situation, some donors are redirecting their aid dollars to other headline-grabbing crises like the conflict in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. However, that has not stopped despondent Darfuris from pouring into the teeming camps.

At Salaam camp — and virtually all camps that dot Darfur — you find clusters of people driven from their homes not only by conflict, but also by failed crops due to last year’s insufficient rains.