The world is failing to provide promised aid to the people of southern Sudan, putting at risk a peace agreement that was praised as a model for resolving ethnic wars afflicting Africa, the UN's top relief official said Sunday.
"In the south of Sudan, the world has really achieved something fantastic in putting an end to the bloodiest war in this region," the official, Jan Egeland, said.
"But now it is not willing to foot the bill of building the peace and providing for the return of refugees," he said.
In a telephone interview from Sudan, Egeland said that only US$25 million of the US$500 million pledged last October for the south had been received and that the half-dozen UN agencies and 30 outside aid groups had underused capacity because of the shortfall.
"My people have built up very dramatically in anticipation that the money will be coming because they simply cannot believe that the donor community will not assist them," Egeland said.
The Islamic government in Khartoum and rebels from the Christian and animist south signed the peace agreement on Jan. 9, ending a 21-year war that the UN estimates cost 1.5 million lives and forced 4 million people to flee their homes.
agreement
Under the agreement, John Garang, leader of the principal rebel group, the Sudan People's Liberation Army, has become the first vice president of Sudan in a government of national unity under President Omar al-Bashir, and the south has been promised a referendum on independence in six years.
The US, a principal promoter of the accord, and the UN expressed the hope that the January signing would serve to speed peacemaking in Darfur, in Sudan's west, where a campaign of ethnic cleansing by government-supported Arab militias has made refugees of as many as 2 million black African villagers and cost the lives of an estimated 300,000 people.
At the UN, Secretary-General Kofi Annan has called an emergency meeting in his office yesterday with members of the Security Council to sound the alarm about the deteriorating situation in Sudan, in the south where the relief effort is being jeopardized by lack of money and in Darfur where the aid effort is threatened by continuing violence.
Egeland said that in southern Sudan, four countries -- Britain, the Netherlands, Norway and the US -- were largely living up to their pledges but that 20 other wealthy nations in Asia, Europe and the Persian Gulf were not.
relief workers
He said that relief workers were feeding 400,000 people in the south but would need to provide for 1.9 million by summer.
Critical efforts to repatriate refugees and reintegrate former combatants have stalled, he said.
"I saw a small project where we have started to make carpenters, tailors and masons out of those who were in the trenches for years, but the project had money only for 50 ex-fighters and it should have had enough for several hundred," he said.
"The local population is growing increasingly frustrated because their countrymen who were war refugees are returning from neighboring countries with no money for food and education, and they become a burden on the community."
Egeland warned that in the absence of assistance, ethnic conflict in southern Sudan could erupt again, endangering the fragile peace only months after the settlement.
He said that the south might have been neglected because of the attention paid crises elsewhere like the tsunami in Asia.
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