IRELAND: Two million lives could be lost in the "forgotten crisis" in the Darfur region of Sudan, a senior UN official warned in Dublin yesterday.
Mr Jan Egeland, Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and emergency relief co-ordinator, said it was "a race against the clock" to prevent disaster.
Formerly Norway's deputy foreign minister and secretary general of the Norwegian Red Cross, Mr Egeland now co-ordinates humanitarian work in 100 countries, but described Sudan as "my biggest challenge".
"The biggest humanitarian drama of our time and age is Sudan and, at the moment, Darfur in western Sudan," he said. "There is no other place in the world where such a human drama is being played out.
"In the shadow of Iraq, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the war against terror, we have two million lives at stake in the Darfur region. If we succeed, we will be able to feed virtually all of them; if we fail, hundreds of thousands of people will perish.
"It's been a race against the clock now, for several months. We have not been winning up until now: I think it's changing as we speak." Last week in Geneva, Mr Egeland co-chaired a "very successful" donor conference with the Minister of State for Development Co-operation, Mr Tom Kitt, on behalf of Ireland's European presidency, and Mr Andrew Natsios, administrator of the US Agency for International Development.
"Sudan is a continent in itself. It is the biggest country in Africa and it has several conflicts in parallel. The one which was for so long really a forgotten crisis was in western Sudan. One of the problems was that many people didn't want to engage politically, emotionally, economically, in yet another crisis in the same country, at the same time as we thought we were solving the north-south \ conflict with the peace talks.
"Therefore the situation was building and I and others were speaking to deaf ears in the beginning of the year. In short, an Arab Muslim militia has been raping, pillaging, ethnically cleansing African Muslim farmers, nomads and herdsmen in large areas of Darfur - areas much larger than Ireland.
"This has been going on since the end of last year but it was particularly cruel, brutal and massive in the months of January to April." He accused the Sudanese government of at least "condoning" the attacks of the militia.
"Now we have more than one million internally displaced [people\] in Darfur and we have another 800,000 to 900,000 people in desperate need of assistance because they have lost everything. They have been housing these hundreds of thousands of internally displaced and therefore giving away the little they had. In addition, we have more than 150,000 refugees in Chad, so altogether it amounts to some two million people."
Describing the attacks by the Janjaweed militia, he said: "These are grown men with Kalashnikovs, often on horseback, attacking women and children. The atom bomb of our time is the Kalashnikov, in a way: it wreaks havoc among civilians."
Mr Egeland was in Dublin for a meeting of the World Food Programme: "One of the reasons we have this conference here is that Ireland was famous for the Great Hunger and is now famous for being one of the emerging big donors."