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Darfur Food Rations Cut in Half    [
Darfur Refugees Forced to Join the Fight    [

    Congress Members Arrested at Sudan Protest
    By Andrew Miga
    The Associated Press

    Friday 28 April 2006

    Five Congress members were willingly arrested and led away from the Sudanese Embassy in plastic handcuffs Friday in protest of the Sudanese government's role in atrocities in the Darfur region.

    "The slaughter of the people of Darfur must end," Rep. Tom Lantos (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., a Holocaust survivor who founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, said from the embassy steps before his arrest.

    Four other Democratic Congress members - James McGovern and John Olver of Massachusetts, Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas and Jim Moran of Virginia - were among 11 protesters arrested on charges of disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly, a misdemeanor subject to a fine.

    "We must hold the Sudanese government accountable for the attacks they have supported on their own citizens in Darfur," Olver said.

    Dozens of demonstrators carried signs, some reading "Stop the slaughter" and "Women of Darfur suffer multiple gang rapes," in front of the embassy Friday morning.

    The protesters cheered as the Congress members and others were cuffed, hands behind their backs, with plastic ties and quietly led to a white police van by U.S. Secret Service uniformed officers.

    The arrests were expected. Lantos' office issued a news release about them in advance.

    The protesters called on the Sudanese government to accept a U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur and allow humanitarian relief organizations full access to victims.

    The three-year-old conflict between rebels and government-backed militias has left at least 180,000 people dead, mostly from war-related hunger and disease, and some 2 million homeless.

    President Bush has voiced support for a stronger international presence in Darfur, and the United States has authorized more than $300 million for victims of the violence and to support peace talks.

    Rallies against the violence in Darfur are planned in more than a dozen U.S. cities this weekend, including on Washington's National Mall on Sunday.

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    Darfur Food Rations Cut in Half
    BBC News

    Friday 28 April 2006

The UN is cutting in half its daily rations in Sudan's Darfur region due to a severe funding shortfall.

    "This is one of the hardest decisions I have ever made," James Morris, head of the UN's World Food Programme, said.

    From May the ration will be half the minimum amount required by each day. The cut comes as the UN said Darfur's malnutrition rates are rising again.

    Nearly 3m in Darfur are totally reliant on food aid after being driven off their land by three years of conflict.

    Despite a ceasefire and on-going peace negotiations, large areas of Darfur are now affected by fighting between government forces, militias and rebels.

    This is also hampering the delivery of food and other aid operations.

    Hunger Season

    "Haven't the people of Darfur suffered enough? We are adding insult to injury," Mr Morris said as he explained that despite appeals to donors, the WFP has received only a third of the money it needs.

    The bill to feed them all is $746m.

    The United States has provided $188m, but little has been received from the European Union and nothing at all from any of Sudan's partners in the Arab League, other than Libya, the WFP says.

    The EU says it has allocated 48m euros ($60m) for the whole of Sudan this year, while the UK will donate 49m ($88m) through various aid agencies.

    The ration cut is designed to ensure that some food lasts through the "hunger season" between July and September.

    "We have been pushed into this last resort of ration cuts in Sudan so we can provide the needy with at least some food during the lean season," Mr Morris said.

    The BBC's Jonah Fisher in the capital, Khartoum, says even if more money was to be immediately promised, Darfur's location, in the centre of Africa, means it could still take up to four months for the rations to arrive.

    Earlier this week, Ted Chaiban, head of Unicef's mission to Sudan, said in the last three months alone, there had been 200,000 people newly displaced in Darfur.

    Aid agencies last year managed to bring the malnutrition rate below the emergency threshold of 15% but south Darfur was seeing those figures again, he said.

    The African Union has set a 30 April deadline for the government and rebel groups to accept their draft peace agreement which addresses power-sharing, wealth-sharing and security.

    Darfur Daily Food Rations

• Minimum requirement: 2,100 kilocalories per person
  
• New amount: 1,050 kilocalories per person
  
• Cut by half: Cereals, blended fortified food and oil
  
• Cut by three-quarters: Pulses, sugar and salt
  
• More than 6.1m people across Sudan require food aid - more than any other country in the world.
  

   

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      Darfur Refugees Forced to Join the Fight
      By Katharine Houreld
      The Christian Science Monitor

      Friday 28 April 2006

  Ahead of Sunday's deadline for Darfur parties to accept a peace deal, rebels are raiding camps to swell their ranks.

      Bredjing, Chad - Last month, Adam Sabun had to decide whether to save his own life or that of his younger brother Abdel.

      The two, whose names have been changed to protect their identity, were among thousands of Sudanese who have been abducted recently from refugee camps in eastern Chad - near the border of the now-infamous Darfur region of western Sudan - and forced to fight by various Chadian and Sudanese rebel groups operating in the area. This new and worrisome development further complicates one of the world's most complex humanitarian crises.

      "I'd had no food for four days," says Mr. Sabun. "I wanted to escape while I could still walk." Other kidnapped refugees had told him that his brother had also been taken. As Sabun searched for his brother, he got weaker and weaker. Finally he slipped the guards and walked seven hours through the desert back to his camp, hoping his brother would do the same. Today, Abdel is among hundreds of refugees still missing.

      Although the exact number is unknown, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that around 4,700 refugees in Chadian camps were abducted last month. Most were taken in the span of three days in mid-March from the camps of Treguine and Bredjing, when unidentified rebels went from tent to tent looking for potential fighters, according to refugees and the UNHCR. Women who tried to cling to their men were beaten back mercilessly, say witnesses. Some men who resisted were tied up at knifepoint and carried off in vehicles. Many of those taken say they saw people tied up and left in the sun for days, or witnessed beatings. Some were killed.

      Among the dusty tents and straw shacks of the refugee camps, the clumps of frightened people do not even know who attacked them, although most of the refugees who escaped agree their kidnappers spoke with Sudanese accents. At least four rebel groups - some Sudanese, some Chadian - are now active along the chaotic border between the two countries.

      Chadian rebel groups aiming to oust President Idriss Deby before next week's elections have grown rapidly and mobilized in recent months. Two weeks ago, hundreds of Chadian rebels made it to Chad's capital, N'Djamena in an unsuccessful coup.

      Meanwhile, Sudanese rebel factions in Darfur continue to battle the government-backed Arabic-speaking janjaweed militias, as they have for more than three years. Both the Chadian and Sudanese rebels have abducted refugees to fight. But now humanitarian agencies are concerned that forced recruitment of refugees by the Sudanese rebels could be used as a pretext for the janjaweed to attack the camps in Chad.

      Since the Darfur conflict began in 2003, about 2 million people have been displaced, and around 200,000 people have died, leading the US to accuse Sudan of genocide and the UN to consider a peacekeeping mission. In a tape released last weekend, Osama bin Laden called for a holy war against any Western troops that may enter Darfur.

      African Union mediators presented a new draft peace agreement to Darfur's warring parties Tuesday at talks in Abuja, Nigeria, and urged them to sign it by the agreed-upon deadline Sunday.

      But observers say a deal is unlikely to happen while Chad remains unstable. "A rebel victory in Chad would significantly strengthen the hand of the government of Sudan both militarily and at the negotiating table," said Colin Thomas-Jensen, an analyst at the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. "Chad could easily and quickly become a base used by [janjaweed] to launch attacks on [Sudanese rebels] based in Darfur."

      Although the Darfur conflict has been marked by gross human rights violations and ethnic cleansing, Olivier Bercault of Human Rights Watch says the forced recruitment of fighters, including children, is a new development.

      Mr. Bercault says the majority of rebels captured by the Chadian government that HRW spoke to say they were kidnapped. Although children currently only account for a small number of fighters in Chad and Sudan, rebel groups had previously been strict about recruiting only adult fighters.But a push by the various rebel groups to gain territory - and therefore bargaining power - ahead of the end of the Abuja peace process, together with upcoming elections in Chad, have sparked a drive to add manpower to the rebel forces, he says.

      "The war is shifting gear and [the various rebel groups] need more people to fight," said Bercault. "I'm very concerned about child recruitment. When you start with this, it's like an addiction. It's difficult to stop."

      Forced recruitment of children has been a tactic used in other African conflicts. In northern Uganda, which borders Sudan, the Lord's Resistance Army often abducts children to fight, sometimes demanding they kill their own parents or be killed themselves.

      In West Africa, forced recruitment and the use of child soldiers was common during regional wars that raged throughout the late 1990s until 2003. The Liberian warlord Charles Taylor even created a special "Small Boys Unit" for his child fighters.

      But the clear-eyed young boys now being held in a government prison in Chad's capital are along way from the drugged-up youngsters that Mr. Taylor recruited. Some insist they joined the rebellion because members of the president's tribe stole livestock from their families. Others, like Zakariah Bashir Ibrahim, say they were tricked into coming to the front.

      The 14-year-old Sudanese boy is one of at least three child rebel fighters currently being held in one of many fetid prison cells in Chad's capital, surrounded by men twice their age. He says he was forced to fight with hundreds of Chadian rebels who two weeks ago fought their way from eastern Chad more than 500 miles to the capital, where many were killed or repelled by forces loyal to Chad's government. Around 235 fighters, including Zakariah, were captured.

      Squatting shyly at the feet of a Chadian soldier, he says he was abducted from Sudantwo months agoby a Chadian national and forced to undergo training. Unlike other child soldiers, he was not issued a weapon but instructed to ride on the back of a pickup truck with a machine gun mounted on the roof. "They invited me to dinner and then took me away," he says quietly. "They didn't tell me the truth.... My family doesn't know where I am."