According to an investigation carried out between Jun. 15 and Aug. 15 in three areas of Darfur by the World Health Organisation (WHO) the mortality rate amongst the internally displaced has soared despite 6 months of humanitarian relief efforts.
WHO and Sudanese Health Ministry officials were able to visit only one camp in the south, Kalma Camp, as violence and threats kept them from accessing other camps in the area.
Oxfam warned in July that Kalma Camp had “all the ingredients for a full-blown epidemic.” They described resources stretched to the breaking point, pools of stagnant water creating breeding grounds for mosquitoes, terrain susceptible to flooding that would lead to acute respiratory and other life-threatening diseases, little drinking water and few latrines leading people to dig shallow, unsafe wells in an area that’s become an open-air toilet.
So it’s no surprise that according to the WHO’s findings the majority of these deaths are due to these conditions:
In all three regions of Darfur, the main cause of death was diarrhoea, while ”injuries and violence” were responsible for perhaps 20 percent of the deaths, and fever and pneumonia were to blame for another large proportion, according to the study.
One-fourth of those interviewed in the camps said their main source of water was ”unprotected wells”, one-third said they had no access to latrines, 45 percent had no soap, and one-third had not received food rations in the past month.
Oxfam has a video you can view in which health expert Jane Bean makes it very clear what these people need. Water, food, latrines, medicine, tents for shelter against the elements. The continuing lack of these resources is killing them.
Sanctions would certainly inflict more hardship and this time wasted in the political wrangling for them in the face of these immediate crises is at the very least a cold and calculated non-response. The United States has an historically lethal way of focussing on desired outcomes and then hastily applying sloppy military methods towards achieving it, covert and otherwise, only to place the blame for the collateral human toll on whomever they’ve targetted. That sanctions are now being threatened without mention of the refusal of rebel forces to accept a bilateral peace agreement is typical of the double-speak the United States employs when it stirs up a hornet’s nest without having a viable structure in place to deal with the horrific consequences of their brainstorms to destabilise regions.
Send aid, not bombs. Send it now.