30 September 2004
Sudan Under Great Pressure Internally, Internationally
USAID Administrator Natsios briefs reporters on Darfur
By Charles W. Corey
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- Darfur is just one of many crises in Sudan that contribute to greater internal and external pressures than the country has ever felt before, Andrew Natsios, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), warned September 29.
Natsios, who briefed reporters at the State Department following his fourth trip to Darfur in 2004, estimated that there are currently 1.5 million Sudanese who have been driven from their homes into displacement camps in western Sudan and eastern Chad but said the situation has been further complicated by an "ethnic polarization," which he called very atypical.
Citing historical evidence, Natsios noted that "typically the African and Arab tribes have intermarried; they've dealt with each other. They have a symbiotic relationship in that the Africans would invite the tribes of nomads into their areas -- so long as they didn't eat their millet fields -- as they were moving south and north during the different seasons of the year.
"That has all been completely disrupted now," he said, so all commercial food deliveries across conflict lines have been shut down, meaning no more food is going back and forth. "The Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) has said none of these Arab nomads can move their animal herds north.... The SLA has said 'you will not move your herds through our lines because half of your herds were looted from our villages.'"
What has resulted, the USAID administrator told reporters, has been a "massive transfer of wealth from the African tribes. "They (the African tribes) don't have vast herds but if you add up what they had and look at what they have now, they have nothing left. Those animals were basically their savings accounts. Those have been all transferred to the Jingaweit, and the Jingaweit now are literally occupying the lands of the farmers.
"If you fly over it, you'll see all these African villages that are burned out and they're completely covered with animals. And so there's been a massive disruption of the economy, which will take a very long time to recover from," he told reporters.
To compound the situation, he said, at least 574 towns and villages in Darfur have been completely destroyed and 157 have been partially destroyed. "So we're dealing with nearly 750 partially or fully destroyed villages," he said.
Additional crises are now under way across Sudan as well, he warned: an ongoing purge in the Sudanese military and a recent attempted coup; a nationwide drought; a severe and increasingly worrisome locust infestation; an incipient rebellion brewing in the east of the country; and rebels operating in the South.
"I've been going to Sudan since 1989 and I have never seen the Sudanese Government in more of a corner, under more stress," he told reporters. The Sudanese government has created that situation itself, he said, especially by what it did in Darfur.
Pressure is also coming from the international coalition the United States has put together, Natsios explained. The two resolutions in the United Nations, Natsios said, "shocked" the Khartoum government "because they were sponsored by the French and the Germans with us, who have been allies of theirs in Europe prior to Darfur."
There is a sense among the Khartoum government, he said, "that the Sudanese traditional mechanisms for dealing with the southern civil war are not working in Darfur."
Commenting on the presence of African Union (AU) peacekeepers in Darfur, Natsios said there was a "unanimity of opinion that the presence of African peacekeeping troops from the AU, even though it's of very modest size, is having a salutary effect on the conflict."
If there was a much larger African force and they were arrayed differently, he said, they would even be more effective. For that reason, he stressed, "we strongly recommend that there be quickly a much larger AU force ... ."
There is a risk, he cautioned, that if such an action is not taken this quickly, there will be more violence. "I don't mean violence between the rebels and the government. I mean civil violence among the different tribes because of the level of rage we're seeing."
Addressing the situation in the camps, Natsios said the situation has stabilized nutritionally but remains "precarious and very fragile, because "we have not peaked yet with the crisis, and if there is a severe drought that will complicate" the situation. "We could have renewed crises later in the year," he warned.
The United States, he said, has contributed $241 million in obligated funds and is currently spending more money than all other donors in the world combined. "The food system has been set up. It's not moving quite as fast as I would like it to, but we are providing about 70 percent of the food in Darfur right now."
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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