New Violence Hinders Relief Efforts in Western Sudan
By SOMINI SENGUPTA
The New York Times

DAKAR, Senegal, Nov. 2, 2004- Even as peace talks continued in an effort to stanch the suffering in western Sudan, kidnappings, land mines and, most recently, a government crackdown on a camp for displaced people, have created new pockets of no-go areas on the ground and made it impossible to deliver relief to tens of thousands of Sudanese, aid groups said.

The latest trouble came early Tuesday when, officials with the World Food Program said, the Sudanese military and police surrounded two camps in the state of Southern Darfur, used tear gas to disperse crowds and began forcibly moving some people from the camps.

Barry Came, a World Food Program spokesman in Khartoum, said in a telephone interview that government officials had told the United Nations agency that the crackdown was aimed at local people who infiltrated the camps to collect food rations meant for those who were displaced from their homes.

Mr. Came said his agency had not been able to verify the government's claim. Roughly 60,000 people in the camps are out of reach for aid workers, he said.

In New York, the United Nations envoy to Sudan, Jan Pronk, said the forced relocation was "in flagrant violation of international humanitarian law" and of agreements he had reached with the leaders of the Sudanese government. He said it was clear from his reports that the relocation was being directed by the Sudanese Army and the police.

In a statement on Tuesday night, Secretary General Kofi Annan condemned the relocation and noted that it directly violated agreements Sudan had made with the United Nations. "I strongly urge the government to halt immediately all such relocation operations and to facilitate the return of the affected persons from the inappropriate sites to which they have been taken," he said.

Mr. Pronk is scheduled to give his monthly report on conditions in Darfur on Thursday to the Security Council, which has threatened to bring sanctions on the government and Sudan's oil industry if conditions do not improve.

Earlier in the week, United Nations and many nongovernmental relief agencies pulled workers from the Jebel Mara region of the state of Western Darfur after a bus, apparently carrying civilians, was hijacked by unknown assailants and 18 Arab passengers were taken hostage. As a result, workers cannot directly serve some 160,000 displaced people there.

A third patch, in the state of Northern Darfur, has been inaccessible to aid workers since October, when two workers with Save the Children, a British relief organization, were killed after their car hit a land mine.

The United Nations refugee agency announced Tuesday at a briefing in Geneva that heightened violence had forced its workers in Darfur to cancel assessment missions that had been planned for this week.

Since early 2003, the war in Darfur has pitted rebels, mainly from African tribes, against an Arab-led government in Khartoum, the capital, and its allied Arab militias in the west. The war has made roughly 1.6 million people homeless and killed countless civilians.

More than 3,000 African Union troops have begun fanning out across Darfur to monitor a tenuous cease-fire. All the while, reports of violence against civilians, including those seeking refuge in government-run displaced people's camps, have continued to pour in.

Peace talks that began eight days ago in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, have yielded no breakthroughs yet.

Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations for this article.