KHARTOUM, 7 August 2003 — Sudan has appealed for international aid to help an estimated 250,000 people made homeless by floods as the Nile and other rivers rise, newspapers reported yesterday.
“(The Foreign Ministry has) appealed to friendly and sisterly countries and other donors to give urgent humanitarian aid for the affected,” the state-owned Al-Anbaa newspaper said.
Last week, heavy rains and floods hit the eastern city of Kassala where the government has said the bursting of the Gash river made about 80 percent of the estimated 280,000 residents homeless. The flood victims in Kassala, about 450 km east of Khartoum, needed tents, sheeting, drugs, insecticides and power generators, Al-Anbaa said.
The Al-Ayam newspaper reported the United States had pledged $250,000 and would send two plane loads of aid to Kassala in the next few days. The independent Al-Khartoum daily said heavy rain flooded a canal on Tuesday, destroying 16 villages and displacing 3,000 families in Gedaref state — a four-hour drive from Khartoum and where most of Sudan’s staple food is produced.
The average family in Africa’s largest country numbers about six people, meaning up to 18,000 could be homeless in Gedaref.
The Nile was still rising and could cause more destructive floods, the independent Al-Rai Al-Aam reported.
In 2001, heavy flooding from the Nile and torrential rains in southern Sudan made thousands homeless. In 1988, dozens of people were killed and around two million lost their homes when the Nile burst its banks.
The government and the Sudan People’s Liberation Army are negotiating to end 20 years of civil war that has plagued a country now looking to its new oil industry to lift it from being one of the world’s poorest nations.
