Sir, - The Sudan Support Group welcomes the recent media attention paid to the famine in South Sudan, endorses all efforts being made by aid agencies to bring emergency relief, especially to the area around Bahr El Ghazel, and hopes the general public will continue to respond generously to the appeal. Emergency relief is however reactive, responding to an immediate crisis and dealing with just one area of a complex situation.
We would draw your readers' attention to the fact that food is still not getting through to the people of the Nuba mountains and many areas in Southern Sudan, that the civil war, raging now for over 15 years has claimed the lives of over a million people in the south of the country, caused over four million to be displaced and a further 500,000 to live in exile in neighbouring countries. Human rights abuses are rampant, women and children are enslaved, children as young as nine or ten years are routinely recruited into the military. Peace negotiations between the extremist Islamic government, which won power by a military coup in 1989, and the Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army (SPLA) in the south of the country, have not yet succeeded and the western world, including the media, have taken little interest in Sudan, a country the size of Europe without the infrastructure which we take for granted.
The people of South Sudan have one continuing and overriding request: that we take notice of their situation and bring it to the attention of world leaders. They are desperate for the chance of peace which will allow them to restructure and rebuild their fragmented community.
We call on the Government of Ireland to exercise its influence through the European Union to encourage all sides, but especially the government of Sudan, to provide permanent unrestricted access to all areas in Southern Sudan for humanitarian relief, and to provide free and fair elections. - Yours, etc., Brendan Henderson,
Chairman, Sudan Support Group, Rathmines, Dublin 6.