Oxfam Rushes to Reach More People in Darfur as Security Worsens
5 November 2004
As people continue to stream into camps in western Darfur looking for security, shelter, and food, Oxfam is scaling up its efforts to provide water and sanitation services to 500,000 Darfur residents by the end of January. With the seasonal rains over and reported crop failures contributing to a growing food crisis, the needs of the people of Darfur remain critical.
The map hanging in a United Nations office in North Darfur makes the case very clear: security in this conflict-wracked region of western Sudan is deteriorating. At a time when Oxfam is gearing up to double the number of displaced people it is trying to help in Darfur, the news is troubling. Insecurity can severely hamper the delivery of aid and force displaced people to remain packed in overcrowded camps or hidden in remote areas cut off from life-saving help.
In the center of the map is El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur and the place where the region's problems first exploded in early 2003 when rebels attacked the airport, leaving dozens of people dead. Now a government stronghold, El Fasher stands out on the map: All around it are roads marked in red-roads the United Nations considers unsafe for travel. Banditry and attacks have been on the rise.
Mat Cousins, Oxfam's program coordinator for North Darfur, doesn't need the map to warn him of the risks of road travel. In late October, two Oxfam vehicles returning along the road from the town of Kebkabiya to the town of Tawila ran into a roadblock where a gang of armed men were holding up a group of commercial trucks. One of the Oxfam vehicles escaped, but the men held the driver of the second vehicle at gunpoint for an hour and a half before releasing him.
"It is clear that the security situation is deteriorating," said Cousins a few days after the incident. Earlier in the month two aid workers from Save the Children were killed when a landmine exploded under their vehicle in a remote northwestern part of the state. Cousins counted one of them among his friends.
"The shocking thing is it could have been any one of us," he said. "It's a very unfortunate accident that underlines the risk we are taking."
Oxfam had plans to expand its water and sanitation programs to Umm Berro, the area where the explosion occurred. Those plans have now been put on hold and the 30,000 people there won't be getting the help they need.
Cousins has also suspended travel for Oxfam vehicles on the Kebkabiya-to-Tawila road for the near future. Oxfam staff heading to Kebkabiya, where more than 40,000 displaced people have crowded into compounds with host families, must now catch rides on a UN helicopter.
"Ongoing violence and insecurity makes this a dangerous and incredibly frustrating environment to work in," said Cousins.
And, he asked, if it's not safe for aid workers to travel the roads, how could it possibly be safe for the 1.4 million displaced people to return to their homes?
New Urgency to Reach More People
It's against this backdrop that Oxfam is now scaling up to double, by the end of January, the number of people it is helping in Darfur. Currently, about 270,000 Darfur residents are benefiting from Oxfam's emergency water and sanitation programs. The goal is to raise that number to half a million in the next three months. The projected cost of this total humanitarian effort is $20.2 million. The new urgency comes from the realization that the needs of countless families continue to grow.
"The number of internally displaced people has been creeping up over the last four months," said Nick Roseveare, deputy director of Oxfam's Humanitarian Department in Oxford, Great Britain. "And particularly in the last month or two we have seen a deterioration in security. With the rains finished, there is also going to be a food crisis."
Oxfam's original plan was to reach all 500,000 people by next April. Now, it's clear the agency can't wait that long. "We've got to put in an extraordinary effort to make sure we reach them sooner," Roseveare said.
Oxfam is the fourth-largest non-governmental aid agency operating in Darfur. It has 56 international staff members working on the crisis and 400 local staff members, and plans to hire an additional 77 people. Already well-established in North and South Darfur, the agency recently expanded into West Darfur, where a camp at Mornei, with 80,000 people, will be its newest project.
"Oxfam has the means to move fast," said Shaun Skelton, the country program manager for Sudan, noting that just renting one large cargo plane to fly a fleet of eight Land Cruisers into the country costs $90,000. The next planeload, packed with two pickup trucks, a drilling rig, and water tanks and bladders, was due to arrive at the end of October.
Oxfam's objectives in this crisis are to reduce the incidence of waterborne illnesses and prevent the outbreak of infectious diseases by insuring that people have access to plenty of clean water and a safe means of disposing of fecal wastes. Along with setting up water systems and digging latrines, Oxfam is also offering community health education and distributing household items—such as soap and water jugs—so people can practice good hygiene.
Though the conditions in which Oxfam works remain extremely volatile, the agency puts a premium on the safety of its staff. Sitting in his dusty, hot office one afternoon in El Fasher, Cousins handed some visitors a thick primer called "Stepping Safely." It offered detailed advice on how to recognize and avoid landmines. Cousins also passed out a 13-page printout detailing Oxfam's security guidelines for Darfur.
The office and guesthouses are guarded at night. Vehicles travel in convoys of two or more when they go out of town, with Oxfam flags flapping and clear signs posted in the windows that no guns are allowed on board. Staffers keep in regular radio contact with headquarters on longer trips out of El Fasher, and cell phones buzz constantly with workers checking up on one another's whereabouts.
Building trust among the people it works with is central to Oxfam's safety plan. But now Darfur's people need to be able to trust in their own government—almost as much as they need food, water, and shelter. Without this, they can't go home.
