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HORN OF AFRICA
IRIN-HOA Weekly Round-Up 202
10 - 16 July 2004


CONTENTS:

SUDAN: Darfur IDPs facing food shortages, forcible return and insecurity
SUDAN-CHAD: WFP agrees new trans-Sahara aid route with Libya
ETHIOPIA: Unprecedented economic and agricultural growth reported for
   2003/2004
ETHIOPIA: 51,000 people still displaced in Gambela after ethnic clashes -
   NGO
ETHIOPIA-ERITREA: Annan calls for "sober choices" to end stalemate
SOMALIA: More funds needed for humanitarian operations - agencies
SOMALIA: UN Security Council condemns those who obstruct peace process


ALSO SEE:

ETHIOPIA: Focus on Boran pastoralists at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=42147


SUDAN: Darfur IDPs facing food shortages, forcible return and insecurity

Since the rains started two weeks ago, displaced people in Western
Darfur's capital, Al-Junaynah, have been facing a shortage of relief food.
Whereas rations have been distributed to some of the internally displaced
persons (IDPs), others have not received any.

The World Food Programme (WFP) has been registering IDPs and trying to
provide them with food. However, it says its efforts have been affected by
a shortage of staff and resources. The agency has been trying to improve
its capacity to respond to IDPs' needs, while appealing for funds to do
so.In the meantime, thousands of IDPs squatting in Al-Junaynah and in the
four camps around the town have had to fend for themselves. [Full story
at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=42119 ]

The "main message" from local authorities in Darfur is that the state's
hundreds of thousands of IDPs will have to go home "soon", according to
relief workers. On 1 July, the Sudanese interior minister and government's
special representative for Darfur, Abd al-Rahim Muhammad Husayn, told
reporters in Northern Darfur that it was "most important" to get people to
return to their villages.

But humanitarian workers fear that a forcible mass return of some 1.2
million IDPs in Darfur could result in enormous fatalities. The IDPs had
no food stocks, and were already weakened from the lack of food aid, an
aid worker told IRIN. Their villages, which had been burned to the ground
by government-allied Janjawid militias, who had also poisoned many of
their wells, were simply uninhabitable, the aid worker added. "The
government wants them to go home, the UN wants them to stay," said another
aid worker. "There is no food [in the villages]: they will go back to
die." [Full story at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=42121 ]

Four months after the Darfur crisis in Sudan was described by the UN as
the "world's worst humanitarian disaster", tens of thousands of people in
Western Darfur still live without shelter or sanitation, receive no food
aid and have to drink contaminated water.

The basic minimum requirements for the 350,000 to 400,000 IDPs in
accessible areas of Western Darfur are far from being met. A further
100,000 vulnerable people might be in areas that had never been accessed,
aid workers told IRIN, not to mention the growing numbers of "conflict
affected" persons, who have depleted their meagre stocks of food in
supporting their displaced kin. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=42144 ]

On Monday, UN agencies reported continuing concern over security in dozens
of IDP camps in the region, following reports that women were being
subjected to gang rapes, according to the UN Office for the Coordination
of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). UN News quoted UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe
in New York as calling on the Sudanese government to station more police
near IDP camps to prevent women who venture out of the camps in search of
firewood from being raped.

Moreover, she said, despite Khartoum's encouragement, the IDPs, who were
mainly indigenous Africans, remained reluctant to voluntarily return to
their home villages without guaranteed protection from attacks by the
Janjawid. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=42149]

On Wednesday, Okabe said that Secretary-General Kofi Annan was dispatching
his Special Representative to Sudan, Jan Pronk, to participate in the
first meeting of the Joint Implementation Mechanism, which was set up on 3
July, UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe said on Wednesday. Pronk was scheduled to
travel to Khartoum on Thursday.

Meanwhile, briefing reporters in New York, Under-Secretary-General for
Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland said his worst fear was that the
insecurity would continue to worsen and possibly force aid agencies to
withdraw staff for their own safety. "Our trucks are looted, our
humanitarian workers are threatened and attacked, and that's not
necessarily only the fault of the government. There are many militias and
other forces" in the region, he said. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=42194]


SUDAN-CHAD: WFP agrees new trans-Sahara aid route with Libya

The WFP said on Thursday it had agreed with Libya to open a new route to
truck food aid to victims of the conflict in Darfur, 3,000 km across the
Sahara desert. The first pioneering convoy would leave the Mediterranean
port of Benghazi in early August, it said in a statement.

WFP's Chief Logistics Officer, Pierre Caras, told IRIN by telephone from
Rome that a new trail would have to be blazed across 1,500 km of roadless
desert between southern Libya and northern Chad to enable the trucks to
get through. But he said the trans-Sahara route would eventually enable
WFP to transport an extra 3,000 mt of food per month to the 1.2 million
people displaced by fighting in Darfur and 175,000 refugees of the
conflict who have fled to eastern Chad.

Caras stressed that the new route would be particularly useful during the
four-month rainy season from June to September, during which many dirt
roads in the Savannah region of the Sahel become impassible, hindering aid
flows into the remote region from Port Sudan on the Red Sea coast and the
Cameroonian port of Douala. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=42214]


ETHIOPIA: Unprecedented economic and agricultural growth reported for
2003/2004

Prime Minister Meles Zenawi said 9 July that Ethiopia enjoyed
unprecedented economic and agricultural growth over the past 11 months.
Presenting his annual progress report for 2003/2004 to parliament, he said
the economy had grown by 11.6 percent, and agriculture by nearly 20
percent.

Meles also told the country's 547 parliamentarians that foreign investment
had grown by over 80 percent last year, while exports had risen by 13
percent in the past 11 months. Ethiopia's priority would now be to boost
the agriculture sector, he said announcing in this context that the food
security budget would be doubled to about US $230 million.

Meles emphasised that without peace future development could be
undermined, but he acknowledged that relations with Eritrea remained in
deep freeze. He revealed that the annual budget for the military for the
current year would remain below $348 million so as not to strain the
economy. [Full story at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=42120]


ETHIOPIA: 51,000 people still displaced in Gambela after ethnic clashes -
NGO

Tens of thousands of people remain displaced following violent clashes in
western Ethiopia's Gambela State, the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said
on Wednesday. In a newly launched profile on internal displacement in
Ethiopia, it said 51,000 people had not returned to their homes. The NRC
said power struggles and ethnic violence had plagued Gambela, which
borders Sudan and is 800 km west of the capital, Addis Ababa, since 2003,
forcing many people to flee their homes.

Its findings also come as an independent inquiry into the violence in
Gambela revealed that some "unidentified" troops from the defence ministry
had murdered 13 people. Kemal Bedri, the chairman of the commission, said
more than a dozen eyewitnesses had provided evidence of the involvement of
defence ministry forces in the attacks. The commission, which reported its
findings to parliament last week, was set up by the government to
investigate the large-scale killings that erupted in early December. The
killings continued during the first quarter of this year.

The commission stated that 65 people, almost all of them ethnic Anyuaks,
were killed in fighting over a weekend in Gambela town. It had been
sparked, the report said, by an attack by Anyuak gunmen on government
refugee workers in which eight people were killed. The bodies of the men -
who were non-indigenous highlanders - had been mutilated in the attack.


ETHIOPIA-ERITREA: Annan calls for "sober choices" to end stalemate

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan has told Ethiopia and Eritrea that "sober
choices" must be made if they are to end their potentially dangerous
stalemate. In his latest report to the UN Security Council on the progress
of the UN Mission in Ethiopia and Eritrea, Annan said the four-year-old
peace process was unlikely to succeed without flexibility from both sides.

He said Asmara and Addis Ababa must explain to their peoples that the
deadlock could not be overcome by digging their heels in. Annan also noted
that the stalemate was a source of instability in the region and could
have potentially devastating results for both nations. "I am concerned
that a relatively minor incident - even one of miscalculation - could
degenerate into a very serious situation, which no one would wish for and
which would be tragic for all concerned," he said.

The peace process between Ethiopia and Eritrea ground to a halt in April
2002 after the independent boundary commission ruled on the disputed
frontier. The commission, which was agreed on by both countries after a
border war ended in December 2000, ruled that certain territories were
part of Eritrea, a decision rejected by Ethiopia. Demarcation of their
1,000-km frontier would by now have been complete, but it was delayed
three times before being suspended indefinitely. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=42124]


SOMALIA: More funds needed for humanitarian operations - agencies

Aid agencies have appealed for US $119.1 million to finance humanitarian
operations in Somalia this year, saying funding requirements had risen
owing to an unforeseen drought in the north and deteriorating food
security in parts of the central regions. The agencies had, in their
Consolidated Inter-Agency Appeal (CAP) earlier this year, asked for $110.6
million, of which donors had so far contributed $27,878,685 (about 24
percent of the total requirements).

"The gravity of Somalia's humanitarian situation demands greater donor
attention for the remainder of 2004," the organisations said in a their
mid-year review of the 2004 CAP for Somalia. "Funding must be sustained to
continue to allow for a timely and effective response to the needs of
drought-affected pastoralists in northern Somalia. Without adequate
rainfall this season, the situation could easily deteriorate and require
an emergency response," they said, adding that the drought had led to
major movements of people and animals and decimated livestock herds.

The revised appeal was intended to help between 700,000 and 900,000
vulnerable people throughout Somalia, according to the mid-year review of
humanitarian needs prepared by OCHA and other UN and non-UN aid agencies.
[Full story at: http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=42169]


SOMALIA: UN Security Council condemns those who obstruct peace process

The UN Security Council has condemned those who, it said, were obstructing
Somalia's peace process, and warned that anyone persisting on the path of
confrontation and conflict would be held accountable. In a statement read
out on Wednesday at an open meeting by its president for July, Ambassador
Mihnea Ioan Motoc of Romania, the Security Council also welcomed steps by
the African Union to prepare for the deployment of military monitors to
Somalia, and called on the Somali leaders to cooperate with that
initiative.

The statement called on the Somali parties to respect a cessation of
hostilities agreement signed between various rival groups in the Kenyan
town of Eldoret in 2002, according to UN News. It also urged Somali
factions to ensure security and to resolve their differences peacefully.

"The Council recognises that while the establishment of a transitional
federal government will be an important step towards establishing
sustainable peace and stability in Somalia, much effort will lie ahead if
this objective is to be achieved," Motoc said. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/print.asp?ReportID=42201 ]


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