KHARTOUM, 23 August 2005 — The United Nations refugee chief visits Sudan today to assess the fate of millions of displaced civilians in war-torn Darfur and the recently pacified south of the country. Antonio Gutteres, starting a 10-day tour that will also take him to Chad and Kenya, voiced his concern ahead of his arrival that the world community was ignoring conflicts in Africa such as those in Sudan.
“It is obvious that there should have been a much stronger effort on the part of the international community to create the conditions for peace but Africa is a continent which is largely forgotten,” the former Portuguese prime minister told Lisbon radio.
“We see that the international community mobilizes easily in other parts of the world but when it comes to Africa there has been a systematic negligence which has prolonged conflicts like this one (Sudan) and gave rise to a serious food crisis in Niger,” he added.
“There is a question of the world’s responsibility toward Africa which needs to be taken seriously.” In Sudan today, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees is scheduled to meet President Omar Bashir, Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail and other officials. He is expected to tour camps in Darfur, a western region home to hundreds of thousands of internally displaced people and still plagued by smoldering violence two and a half years after a deadly rebellion broke out.
The uprising by the black African minority was fiercely repressed by Bashir’s Arab Muslim regime and its proxy militias, aggravating a dire humanitarian crisis. According to varying estimates, between 180,000 and 300,000 have been killed in Darfur since February 2003 and more than two million displaced.
