Transcript of London news conference by James Morris,
Executive Director, UN World Food Programme
4th of May 2004INTRODUCTION:
In Darfur, about a million people in the most violent way have been driven from their homes. About half of them now are living in camps, and about half of them are still wandering around in the hills and who knows where.
Any time a person is driven from their homes, it's the most serious kind of humanitarian crisis. But these were people who were generally leading peaceful lives, managing their own livelihoods, their own families. Suddenly all that's taken away from them.
After we made these trips, I visited a camp at Morney (phonetic spelling) where there were 60,000 internally displaced people there: 17,000 women, 9000 men, 34,000 children. I visited the camp at Sisi (phonetic spelling), which probably between 30,000 and 34,000 people.
We came back and made the case to the government as strongly as we possibly could that the government has the enormous responsibility to provide protection, security. These are people that want to go home, but they're frightened to go home. I've never seen people that are so frightened. They want to go home, but they don't want to go home to an environment that might cause them to have the same kind of experiences that drove them away in the first place. So we made the point to the government that the government has to be very preoccupied about providing a secure environment.
Secondly, we talked about the issue of access, that this is a crisis that's going to require many more people from the UN family dealing with issues of food, water, sanitation, health, shelter, clothing, as well as many more NGO partners. Oxfam and Save the Children UK are there as well as Care, the Red Crescent society is working, but the government needs to be sensitive to the importance of providing quick entry visas, providing travel permits, and providing easy importation of vehicles and well-drilling equipment, food and whatever is necessary. So, we tried to make those points as forcefully as we could to the government.
We also met with donors and with NGOs and all sorts of people while we were there. Then, I went on to Chad for two days to visit several camps in Chad. There are now about 95,000 refugees in Chad. We would say 52,000 are actually registered in the camps, and 43,000 would be present on the perimeter of the camps. It's the most depressing sight to see, 95,000 people displaced far from home, but I suspect they feel some greater degree of security, having crossed the border, because the people in the camps in Sudan were frightened even to go outside the camp to search for firewood or water or plant material for their animals.
I had good visits with the President, the Prime Minister, and the Foreign Minister of Chad, and Chad has been very welcoming and supportive of the refugees, and very sensitive to their needs. But, as you know, eastern Chad is a tough place in the best of circumstances and you put this huge population on top of what is already living there, it's a very challenging situation.
We're all struggling with the rainy season, the rainy season will be here in a few weeks, and to get food pre-positioned so that people who won't have access to normal transportation during the rainy season will have access to food. But, the rainy season also produces serious consequences for issues of sanitation and health, etc.
It was not uncommon to visit with a lady who said, "I've lost all my clothing, and I'm sharing my one tote with three other ladies, we can only go out one at a time." Or to visit with a child. I said, "Are you still in school," and he said, "No, I used to be, but I'm not in school right now."
One of the tragedies of the people coming across the border into Chad is what this does to separate families. Children get away from their Mum and Dad during expeditions like this, then the camps in Chad, just huge numbers of children everywhere.
So, the humanitarian crisis is enormous. It will only ultimately be solved if the Government of Sudan is able to control the militia, get the conflict in hand.
The good news is the ceasefire between the Government of Sudan and the rebels in the south is essentially holding. It's a 45-day ceasefire that will essentially go to the end of the month, but some of the parties to the conflict are not signatories to the peace agreement, and are not bound by it.
Getting the conflict under control, and then getting law and order restored, so the civilian population feels protected and safe to begin to return home voluntarily, and once they get home, the international community will have to be available to help, because these are folks who have lost everything. I mean, it's difficult to imagine. You drive through the countryside and see village after village where maybe 250 families lived, destroyed.
So my purpose being here today was to visit with Hilary Benn, the Secretary of State for International Development, and to tell him first hand of the crisis. The UK is always one of the best humanitarian supporters in the world. They've supported our work in Sudan, in the Darfur region, and Chad, and I had a good hour visit with him to talk about this crisis this morning. So, I'd be happy to answer your questions if I can.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
QUESTION: Could you give us a bit more sense of what you saw in Darfur, what the landscape was like, what you think the most urgent need is for those people still inside Darfur?
ANSWER: Well, the landscape is barren and dust. This is desert. This is a very tough environment under the best of circumstances, and villages, the homes have some sort of adobe base with straw or roofs conical in shape made from vegetation, but they're burned down. People have gone through in the most malicious, heinous way, and burned down homes. You see pots and remnants of clothing that have been burned, and the landscape is strewn with this kind of stuff, and this is a community of 250 families, and there might be three men left, and these three men are just bewildered.
They know they'd like to replant their crops after the rainy season, but they're frightened, very frightened. I cannot overstate this, and the government needs to behave in such a way that security comes back. But there's a great gap of trust between the population and government, so the government's got a big job to do.
But their families have gone to camps. Usually the camps are between 10 and 50 kilometres away, but those people have gone from villages like this to Chad, and have travelled for many, many days. Sometimes they describe the distance travel in terms of how many days of a donkey ride it took to get there. In the camps, the camps are full of children. The camps are full of people who are sad and listless.
In our business, we're very concerned about food and nutrition and its impact on health, and all sorts of issues, but visiting with the team from MSF France, they said the number of children who were chronically, or acutely malnourished had gone from a few hundred to more than 2,000 in four or five weeks. These are children under five, and there is nothing more important in the life of a very young child, than nutrition in the first few years of life. If that issue is not seriously addressed, it becomes a problem that a human being can never recover from.
You had three or four people from MSF France providing healthcare for this village of more than 60,000 people. They were having to triage all of their folks who came for help to help the most seriously at risk. This is an environment where there are far too many weapons and guns. The disarmament that needs to take place here is very serious. We've at least offered the opportunity to think about where we can trade food for guns, and whether people might be incented to turn in their weapons. You don't want to end up in a situation where only the mean spirited have weapons.
You can imagine a if you were driven from a place you'd spent your life with your family and your friends, you'd want to go back, and if you were afraid to go back, you know, the trauma and the emotion is enormous.
QUESTION: Who makes the camps inside Darfur, who is protecting the camps? Is it the government?
ANSWER: I suspect the government's had some role in choosing where the camps are located. The governors of the territories have had a role in that, working with the central government, and the United Nations community has had probably some input.
QUESTION: Are they protected, these camps?
ANSWER: Well, I think there's some degree of protection inside the camp. People are frightened to venture outside the camp. That's a basic issue of human rights, the freedom of movement, to voluntarily, come and go. These are very sizeable operations, a camp of 60,000 internally displaced people. Now there is some community governance and tribal governance that comes along with this, and that helps with the security issue within the camp.
QUESTION: I'm somewhat puzzled that you say the ceasefire is holding, when there are still reports of attacks and fighting?
ANSWER: Well, the Janjaweed is not party to the ceasefire agreement. The ceasefire is between the rebels in the south and the government, and that's a big piece of the problem, that they're not bound by the same agreement.
QUESTION: I'm interested to know what the government people accompanying you told you about why the villages were burnt out. Did you meet any militia? And did you see any sign that the government is controlling the militias?
ANSWER: We were there for just a short period of time. We had extensive conversations about the protection and the security issue. Ultimately, the responsibility for the people at risk, is the responsibility of the Government of Sudan. All the UN community or the NGO community can do is to help, and to respond to humanitarian issues.
Each time we raised these issues and concerns, we were assured that the government was taking them seriously, and would be focussed on the issues of protection and security and the issue of access for NGOs and the UN family, but only time will tell.
What I know is that the world is going to be enormously focussed on this issue for a long time, but because it's so sad, so tragic, so serious, so many people at risk, there will be sizeable interest from the international community on how the Government of Sudan handles these matters.
QUESTION: Were you convinced?
ANSWER: I think on occasion people will say this is a conflict that has been going on for years, but the fact of the matter is that the conflict is much more serious today than it has been historically. There haven't been a million displaced people, 100,000 refugees in Chad, historically, so it's clear that the magnitude of the conflict has been exacerbated, accelerated beyond anything it has been in recent history.
So, I'm willing to give people a chance, to trust them in the beginning, but my focus from the World Food Programme point of view, and my assignment as the leader of this humanitarian mission was on the very serious humanitarian concerns of people. That includes water, healthcare, sanitation, clothing, food, education, and for us to make progress on these issues, the government has to do its job in terms of protection and security. The world won't tolerate a million people being at risk.
QUESTION: You've only got about a month or so before the rainy season begins, how do you think you'll really be able to help these people in time?
ANSWER: I think we will be able to do our job in Chad. We need to pre-position about 7000 metric tons of food in the next few weeks. We have about 3,500 metric tons of food pre-positioned already, and the rest of the food, I think, is on the way. We will have to distribute 1,000 tons a week, and I believe we can do that. So, if the magnitude of the problem in Chad doesn't get larger than what we expected, we'll be able to do our job. But we may have a small shortcoming of salt or one of our blended products.
The concern in Chad is if the numbers - we've been looking at say 100,000 people, plus around 12,500 affected people in the areas where the refugees have come because of the burden it puts on the environment. If suddenly the number went to 160,000 or 200,000 or larger than that, then we would have a very serious problem. The landscape is such that with very heavy weather you either can't move through because of the mud or water, or if you do, you do serious damage to the roads. In those circumstances we would try to do airlifting, but you can truly only airlift modest amount of food. But, I'm optimistic we can do our job in Chad from a food perspective.
I'm more troubled about the situation in the Darfur region. We're waiting for a commitment from the European Community to essentially fund our requirements in Chad, but it's a much smaller amount of money. The food request in the Darfur region for the rest of the year is about $100 million, and we have about 30 per cent of that in hand right now.
We are making a very urgent appeal, very serious, for people to give us cash so we can buy sorghum, which is available in Sudan right now, and we always prefer local purchase, and if we have the cash, we can buy the sorghum, and do the distribution quickly. We've had lots of meetings with our supporters and major donors, and commitments in the next few days are critical to our ability to purchase the stocks, but we won't be able to do the job perfectly in Sudan.
QUESTION: I've been talking to people in the region and many believe the peace negotiations are going nowhere because they don't take into account the complexity of the situation - is the United Nations aware of the complexity of all of these components?
ANSWER: I'm going to ask you to redirect that question to the Secretary General of the UN and the people at peacekeeping and political affairs. I'm on the humanitarian side of the operation.
QUESTION: Did you feel, while you were there that there was more to it than meets the eye?
ANSWER: I think it's a very complex situation and there are lots of parties to this conflict, and everyone needs to have peace, and everyone needs to be focussed on providing protection and security for people, so that they can go home and return to their normal lives and be productive and look after their families.
The government clearly has to get control of the militia and return to an environment of law and order and protection and if that doesn't happen, this is a crisis that will be with us for a long period of time. I'm always frightened because, you know, the world's replete with examples of where a conflict where people move to camps for a few weeks, and suddenly it's 10 years later and people are still living there. In our business, what takes place at the very beginning, the first investment up front is the most powerful, and that's why this can't be allowed to linger.
QUESTION: In terms of the scale of the crisis, how did you find it?
ANSWER: It's very, very serious. It's as serious as anything in the world today. You have a large number of people who have been chased from their homes in the most violent of circumstances. Their lives are very vulnerable, they're severely at risk. They need food, water, education, healthcare, clothing, and any time one person is at risk, it's a serious matter.