c. 2005 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Sudan’s stumbling effort to end a 22-year-old civil war faces renewed difficulties if Western nations don’t follow through on providing $4.5 billion they have promised to help implement a peace accord.

Southern Sudan faces large-scale hunger and perhaps renewed fighting if promises for aid aren’t kept.

At the same time, donor nations are being asked to provide another $466 million to beef up the African Union peacekeeping force in the western Sudan region of Darfur where a separate civil war has claimed 180,000 lives and displaced about 2 million people, according to estimates by aid agencies and the United Nations.

Further adding to the instability, the Sudanese government over this past weekend arrested two officials with the Dutch branch of Doctors Without Borders as well as a Sudanese translator provided by the group for U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan.

The government was angered by a March report from Doctors Without Borders which said its doctors had collected medical evidence of some 500 rapes in Darfur and that the victims reported their attackers were soldiers or members of the government-backed militia.

The Doctors Without Borders translator accompanied Annan to Darfur on Sunday (May 30). There the secretary general heard rape victims tell their stories, Reuters reported Monday (May 31).

The African Union has estimated it needs some $723 million to increase and supply its Darfur peacekeeping force from 2,270 troops to 12,300 troops. The Brussels-based International Crisis Group said the AU plans are too little, too late.

“It is clear the current security and humanitarian situation in Darfur demands a much greater presence than is currently in train,” the group said in a statement May 25, the day before a donors’ conference at which the United States pledged an additional $50 million, on top of $95 million already promised, to end the Darfur fighting.

The meeting resulted in total pledges of $300 million.

Annan told the meeting in Addis Ababa that the international community was “running a race against time,” due in part to weather.

“The rainy season and the `hunger gap’ are approaching fast, making our relief operations more difficult just as they need to expand further,” Annan said.

Even as the donors’ conference had been about to begin, the Bush administration came under renewed pressure from human rights and religious groups to do more to stop the violence in Darfur.

“In September 2004, your administration rightfully recognized that the crisis in Darfur constitutes genocide,” the groups said in a May 24 open letter to Bush. “Yet the U.S. failed to respond to this genocide with the urgency that is required.”

The United States is the only government to date to label the killing in Darfur genocide. The fighting pits black African tribal groups against Arab militias known as Janjaweed widely believed to be operating on behalf of the government in Khartoum.

“As the death toll in Darfur continues to mount, it is clear that nothing short of international intervention can protect the people of Darfur,” the letter to Bush said. “We call on you to assert U.S. leadership to ensure such an international intervention takes place as matter of the greatest urgency.”

The letter, initiated by Africa Action, was signed by a host of religious, labor and civic groups including American Jewish World Service, the National Council of Churches, Physicians for Human Rights, the Save Darfur Coalition, the All Africa Conference of Churches, the Union for Reform Judaism and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

Sudan has rejected any non-African troops as peacekeepers in Darfur.

Perhaps more troubling than the ongoing controversy over Darfur is the threat to the peace agreement in the south, where the region faces its worst famine since 1998, when 60,000 people died.

“The U.N. food pipeline is empty,” John Garang, chairman of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, told Annan during a meeting Sunday, according to news reports from Rumbek, Sudan.

Garang, who led the rebel SPLM during the decades-long war in the south, said that some 250,000 people have returned to the south since the peace accord was signed with much fanfare earlier this year.

According to U.N. and aid officials, donors, focused on the ongoing problem in Darfur, are failing to follow through on the promises to southern Sudan made in Oslo in April when the international community pledged $4.5 million to implement the peace accord.

“After all the push that there’s been for the peace process one would expect that there would have been a lot of support for Sudan,” Laura Melo, spokeswoman for the U.N.’s World Peace program, told the Reuters news agency.

“We’re really extremely concerned that if we don’t answer to the needs of the population there could be a very serious impact on stability,” Melo said.

Garang, after his talks Sunday with Annan, said the Oslo conference “made a lot of promises … . We were happy with the pledges but they are not helping us now as our people would deserve.”

Jean-Jacques Graisse, World Food Programme senior deputy executive director, said that of the $302 million requested by the WFP for operations in southern Sudan, only $78 million has been received.

“I am worried some areas may suffer a disaster if we don’t have the resources to save lives,” Graisse said.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair has said he will push for doubling aid to Africa _ not just Sudan _ when the Group of Eight industrial nations meet in Scotland in July.

Whether the rhetoric of aid can be translated into the reality of dollars before a humanitarian disaster is still up in the air.

DEA/RB END RNS

Editors: Search the RNS photo Web site at https://religionnews.com for Sudan photos that could accompany this story.