Threat of humanitarian crisis in Sudan
From CNN's Brian Todd in Washington:
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- In Africa's largest country -- gutted by civil war for a generation -- in a place so chaotic Osama bin Laden once found it to be the ideal place to hide, another calamity unfolds.
Andrew Natsios, a U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator, describes it as "the worst humanitarian disaster in the world right now."
This is the situation in Sudan, where a cease-fire between the Muslim government in the north and southern Christian rebels is taking hold after 21 years and more than two million lives lost.
Now, in the Darfur region, three provinces in western Sudan, so many disasters converge at once: starvation, a refugee crisis, intense combat and charges of mass murder, mass graves, systematic rape and ethnic cleansing.
"There is a grave threat of genocide, in Darfur, right now," says Jerry Fowler of the Committee on Conscience at the Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Consider what's already happened. Since the fighting in Darfur started just a little more than a year ago, the United Nations and USAID estimate at least 10,000 people have been killed, some 400 villages have been burned to the ground and one million people displaced, with about 100,000 of them spilling over the border into neighboring Chad.
Officials at USAID tell CNN they would not characterize this as genocide, emphasizing the looming humanitarian crisis.
"There's really no way of knowing how they are going to survive in the coming months when they have no means again of caring for themselves," says Samantha Power of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
Who's perpetrating it?
In Darfur, unlike in the broader Sudanese civil war, the conflict is not religious but ethnic: Sudan's Muslim government, made up mostly of Arabs, is accused of backing Arab militias there, who, according to many observers, are trying to push black Muslim tribes out.
And many aid groups on the ground believe the Arab militias, called the jingaweit, are getting much more than just ideological support from the Sudanese government.
"Some jingaweit attacks are just local, some rely on air power from above. Again, that would be Sudanese Air Force support. The Sudanese government has done nothing to rein in people who have committed excesses," says Power of the Kennedy School.
CNN confronted the top Sudanese diplomat in Washington about charges that, at the very least, his government is looking the other way.
"It is totally untrue. We have nothing to hide here," says Khidir Haroun Ahmed, the Sudanese charge d'affairs in Washington. "It doesn't make sense that the government, at such a critical time, will open a new front in order to tarnish its image before the international community."
Ahmed also says his government is cooperating with aid groups and the United Nations.
But those groups and the displaced villagers they are trying to help are facing another ominous development: The rainy season is starting.
"They get wet, they get measles, they get everything else. That's where your big body count rises," says Roger Winter of USAID.
Projections for that body count, just for the coming months, are staggering. Some human rights groups say several hundred thousand people could die, but the United Nations says all six million people in the area are at risk of starvation, unless food gets to them. In the rainy season, aid convoys get bogged down, can't move and then add bureaucratic complications.
The Sudanese government is accused of stalling the visa process for U.S. aid groups and others.
"You should not imagine that just in one day you'd be given a visa to -- I mean, so -- this is part of this sensational campaign against the government," says Khidir Haroun Ahmed.
The charge d'affairs says his government will grant visas for USAID and other groups to go into Darfur. Officials at USAID tell us they don't have those visas in-hand yet and that they'll also need travel permits, a process that could take several days.
If and when they're allowed in: Will help come too late for a people suffering on what aid groups say is a catastrophic and familiar scale?
Asks Jerry Fowler of the Committee on Conscience, "Ten years from now, will we look back and say 'Darfur was another failure, or will we say that we responded in a way that we didn't respond to the Holocaust and we didn't respond to Rwanda?"
