Providing Aid For Darfur Isn't Easy
Allen Pizzey has been a CBS News correspondent based in Rome since l989. Before that, he worked out of the CBS News bureaus in Athens (1982-89) and Johannesburg (1980-82).
Flying into this rundown town in the middle of Darfur in a clattering Russian MI-8 helicopter with only half its gauges functioning gives one a fine perspective of just how vast the problems are here — and how hard it is for even the most dedicated of aid workers to make a difference.
This isn't exactly the middle of nowhere. But if the dust wasn't so thick and the haze created by 112 degrees of sunlight beating off the anvil of the earth so eye-squinting, there is a good chance you could see it from here.
Just outside the town, some 21,000 people, mostly women and children, have settled down for the long haul in a sprawling camp of grass and stick huts.
Driven from their homes in the hinterland by marauding bands of militias, they are officially called IDPs — Internally Displaced Persons. It's another way of saying that they are totally dependent on the kindness of strangers, because without food aid, they would die. About 2.5 million people have been displaced by the war here.
It's not that any of them want to be in camps, but it is the only way they have access to food and a modicum of safety.
Hadja Idris Adam, tall, slim and strikingly beautiful in a bright green dress of the flowing style favored by women and girls in this part of the world, was collecting her ration of grain, sorghum, salt, cooking oil and sugar.
"We are safe here," Hadja Idris said though an interpreter. "If we go out of the camp, the Janjaweed may rape us."
The Janjaweed are an ethnic Arab militia that has preyed on black African tribes. The camel- and horseback-mounted raiders, backed by — and some say a creation of — the Sudanese government, are generally seen as the main problem. But in fact, the militia has splintered, as have others that were formed by warlords, political figures and tribal groups simply trying protect themselves, to the point where there are at least a dozen armed groups causing havoc across Darfur. An estimated 1,500 villages have been burned.
Roughly the size of Texas, Darfur is described as the world's worst humanitarian crisis.
Virtually all of the food aid distributed here is provided by the World Food Programme. The WFP, the world's largest aid agency, feeds some 90 million people in 80 of the world's poorest countries.
Sudan, and the Darfur region in particular, provides a unique challenge, not merely because of the size of the region and the scale of the crisis but also because of the security.
Militias are very fond of the four-wheel-drive vehicles that are the only way to take the aid on what passes for roads here, so they tend to hijack them on a regular basis. The WFP lost at least 120 vehicles last year — and when we visited last week, the count for this year was up to 49. Some are retrieved, usually after they have been crashed by looters with little if any idea how to drive. Others end up in the used car markets of neighboring Chad.
Increasingly, the militias have been kidnapping aid agency staff, mainly local Sudanese. While so far almost all of them have been released unharmed, the situation grows worse by the day.
"Initially we were able to communicate with the various rebel factions and inform them that we were coming," he said. "Generally, they were very cooperative and let us enter the areas with very little threat back in the early summer last year. But with the splintering of the different factions that are involved, communication has become very difficult and sometimes commanders are not aware that we are there or there are junior commanders that are taking advantage of the situation."
Technically, the 7,000 soldiers of the African Union force here, known as AMIS (African Mission in Sudan) are supposed to be on hand to help keep aid workers safe. But as several put it, with some sympathy, it has to be said, "They can barely protect themselves."
Indeed, as we were leaving one camp late in the afternoon, trying to get back to the living compound before dusk fell and the curfew came into force, a lone white-painted AMIS armored personnel carrier stood at the edge of the camp, the officer standing in the turret and waving frantically at us to hurry up. The sooner we left, the sooner he and his men could retreat to the relative sanctuary of their own compound.
WFP and other aid agencies operating in Darfur all have security officers, but none are armed. Humanitarian agencies have a strict "no guns" policy. It is so strictly observed that the armed personal bodyguard of a government minister who hitched a ride on one of the flights we took was asked to give his weapon to the pilot for the duration of the flight. He complied.
The aid agencies' security men can only provide risk assessment, plot routes and tactics to keep everyone in contact, and negotiate with militias to try to ensure safe passages.
Increasingly, the WFP has had to rely on what it calls its Humanitarian Air Service.
Made up of the Soviet-era helicopters and a fleet of fixed-wing light aircraft, the service carries up to 10,000 passengers every month, including assessment teams, health workers and others.
As the security situation deteriorates, as it has continued to do in spite of much-ballyhooed "peace deals," the helicopters are used to hit what the WFP calls "targets of opportunity." That means when an area stabilizes for a while, even a day, the teams get in fast, do as much as possible and get out again.
But it costs up to $3,000 an hour to fly a helicopter, and the WFP calculates it needs an additional $27 million for the air service budget to keep it running to the end of the year.
Having hitched a ride on a couple of their flights, this reporter has nothing but admiration for those who fly on the service to save lives.
By Allen Pizzey