U.N. hopes to access Sudan war zone with AU and Arabs

A joint proposal by the U.N., Arab League and African Union is the best hope for bringing aid to war-torn areas of Sudan where the situation threatens to rapidly deteriorate, a U.N. official said on Thursday.

More than 360,000 people have been internally displaced or severely affected by the fighting that began last June in South Kordofan state and later in Blue Nile, the United Nations says.

With Sudan severely restricting the work of foreign relief agencies in the war zone, international concern is mounting over malnutrition and food shortages in the area.

The White House warned this month that if humanitarian access were not granted by March, conditions would be one step away from a full-scale famine.

Mark Cutts, who heads the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Sudan, told AFP that the U.N., AU and Arab League submitted their proposal two weeks ago to Khartoum.

“We are waiting for a positive response from the government so that we can be able to deliver the aid,” he said.

The plan calls for the three organizations to assess the needs and humanitarian situation throughout the conflict area, and then to deliver assistance to the needy, “whether they be in government areas or SPLM areas.”

Most government aid has gone to government-held zones, Cutts said.

Asked if the U.N.-AU-Arab League plan is the best hope for gaining full access to the conflict-hit region, he said: “I think it is at the moment.”

Ethnic minority insurgents from the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement-North, who fought alongside the former rebels now ruling South Sudan, are battling government troops in South Kordofan and Blue Nile.

South Sudan became independent in July after an overwhelming vote that followed more than two decades of civil war.

“We believe that unless we’re able to mount a humanitarian operation that has the consent of all sides, the situation there is going to deteriorate very rapidly,” Cutts said.

Sudan’s Social Welfare Minister Amira al-Fadel Mohammed told a news conference that a committee is reviewing the U.N.-AU-Arab League proposal before the government makes a decision.

It has cited security reasons in restricting the aid work of foreigners.

Sudan’s U.N. ambassador also accused aid workers of using U.N. flights to deliver arms and ammunition to the rebels -- a claim for which the U.N.’s top humanitarian official said there was “no evidence.”

After not being allowed into the conflict area for several months, seven expatriate officials from various aid agencies had been expected to fly on Thursday to Kadugli, the South Kordofan capital.

But the flight was cancelled at the last minute, aid workers said.

“We were told that the heads of office who were there before could go in,” said Jill Helke of the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Then the IOM and another agency were told they needed to fulfill an additional procedure, leading the whole flight to be scrapped, Helke told AFP.

The U.N.'s World Food Program on Thursday finished giving out food to about 17,000 people who had fled in recent weeks to the outskirts of government-held Kadugli after fighting elsewhere in South Kordofan.

It said the distribution, which began on Friday, followed a WFP assessment and marked the first time it has given out food since much earlier in the conflict, when it reached an estimated 195,000 people.

But the agency said it needs access to the rest of the region.

“Definitely our main concern is to reach all conflict locations in South Kordofan because we are concerned about the food situation there,” Corinne Fleischer, the WFP’s deputy regional director, told AFP.

At Thursday’s news conference, Sudan’s Humanitarian Affairs Commission presented the results of an assessment which it said showed the food situation in 11 of 19 South Kordofan districts was normal.

It did not mention the other eight districts.