UNITED NATIONS, April 5 (UPI) -- Fresh from his first visit to the conflict-torn nations of the Central African Republic, Chad and Sudan, the U.N. emergency relief coordinator warned of the threat posed by violence spilling across those countries' borders.
All three nations feel the effects of what has been happening in Sudan's festering western Darfur region in the past four years, where more than 2 million people have been left homeless and more than 200,000 have died as a result of the conflict.
The world organization is still working with Khartoum to get a sizeable force into Darfur to assist the 7,000 African Union troops already deployed.
Undersecretary-General John Holmes said the council's discussion had underlined the concern was not only Darfur, but also contagion of the situation in Chad and the Central African Republic.
The three tracks of humanitarian access, political action and delivery of security should be addressed in parallel; more so, as the mandate of the AU mission in Sudan expires June 30.
The council had said there was a need for three phases; the first being the "light phase," which was being carried out. Full agreement with Khartoum on the second phase, the "heavy support package," had not yet been reached. The nature of the third phase was that the "hybrid operation" had to be "crunched."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon Thursday told reporters in New York a meeting was to be held Monday in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to discuss the movement of a "heavy support package" into Darfur, including 3,000 military police officers and support staff.
"The April 9 meeting is not intended to renegotiate the heavy support package proposal I made," he said. "As the government of Sudan has made certain reservations on my proposals, this meeting will be used to clarify and for an exchange of views."
The support package is meant to pave the way for an eventual 21,000 hybrid AU-U.N. force. But that move has been held up by Sudan's president, Omar al-Bashir, who has asked Ban to reopen talks on the force.
Ban has made resolving the conflict in Sudan a top priority. But despite the difficulty in getting Sudan to agree to U.N. intervention, Ban has asked talks on sanctions be delayed.
"My position at this time is that, before we talk about sanctions, let me have some more political space to deal with this dialogue with them," he told reporters Monday.
Holmes said, "The humanitarian situation in all three countries is truly alarming."
He said conditions were deteriorating despite the persistent efforts of U.N. humanitarian agencies and non-governmental organizations. Relief operations have become extremely fragile, especially in Darfur, because of increasing direct attacks on aid workers, mainly by rebels.
"In each country the fundamental and crying need is above all for political solutions brought about through dialogue and mediation," the former British envoy to France said, adding there was a clear regional aspect to the conflicts, especially in the spillover from the Darfur crisis to eastern Chad, where hundreds of thousands of Darfur refugees are living in camps.
But "there is a clearly internal aspect to each conflict too, tempting though it is for the governments concerned to shift all the blame on to Darfur," said Holmes. "In other words, there have to be national solutions in additional to the regional approach."
A multidimensional international force could be deployed to the troubled northeast of the CAR without the approval of neighboring Chad, which is beset by its own civil strife, Holmes told the council Wednesday. But he also said some sort of international presence was also vital in eastern Chad, where hundreds of thousands of refugees from the CAR and Darfur, as well as internally displaced persons, are living.
The CAR has said it supports the arrival of an international force to try to stabilize its northeast, where almost 300,000 villagers have become displaced in the past year because of clashes between rebels and government forces and the torching of numerous towns and villages by rebels.
Many Central Africans have been forced to live in the bush out of concerns for their safety if they stay in villages or camps, the world organization's top humanitarian official told the panel.
He later told reporters outside the council chamber Chadian officials have said while they are willing to have international gendarmes or police in the east of the country, they are not so enthusiastic about a foreign military presence.
"The position of the United Nations, as you know, is that you can't have one without the other, that military protection is needed," Holmes said, adding there was widespread support within the council for an international force to be deployed in eastern Chad and the CAR.
--
(With additional reporting from Suzanne Bates at the United Nations.)
