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HORN OF AFRICA
IRIN-HOA Weekly Round-Up 205
31 July - 6 August 2004


CONTENTS:

ERITREA: Shift in focus could aggravate situation, UN warns
ERITREA: Refugee repatriation from Sudan to end this year
ETHIOPIA: Potential humanitarian crisis in Somali region
SUDAN: UN, gov't sign deal on disarming militias in Darfur
SUDAN: UN to maintain pressure on Khartoum over Darfur
SUDAN: Thousands demonstrate in Khartoum
SUDAN: Darfur IDPs fear to go home due to insecurity and abuses - Deng
SUDAN: Southern states facing nutritional emergency
SOMALIA: Disputes delay formation of transitional parliament again


ERITREA: Shift in focus could aggravate situation, UN warns

Some 1.9 million Eritreans who are currently in need of food aid could
suffer even more because the world has shifted its focus to other crises
such as Darfur in western Sudan, the United Nations has warned. Eritrea
grew only 20 percent of the food it needed last year and has appealed to
the international community for US $120 million to, among other things,
offset the shortfall. But so far, just 28 percent of the appeal has been
promised - significantly less than what was pledged at the same time last
year. "When we speak to donors they mention problems in Darfur just in the
same way last year they were mentioning problems in Iraq," Simon Nhongo,
the UN resident humanitarian coordinator in Eritrea told IRIN.

"The donors were not reluctant or embarrassed to say that Eritrea would
not get much support," he added. "With the onset of the Darfur problem the
world's attention is going to be diverted away from Eritrea and the actual
assistance is going to be diverted away too." Eritrea has suffered four
consecutive years of drought, creating a need for food aid for 1.9 million
people. Lack of consistent rain has been compounded by instability
relating to the still undemarcated border with Ethiopia. According to
relief workers, at least 10 percent of Eritrea's 3.3 million people are
currently in military service creating a shortage of manpower.

[Full story
at: http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=42492 ]


ERITREA: Refugee repatriation from Sudan to end this year

The repatriation of one of Africa's oldest refugee populations from Sudan
to Eritrea is expected to be completed by the end of this year, the United
Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) said. Many of the refugees have lived in
eastern Sudan for more than 30 years, having fled fighting and famine
during Eritrea's long independence war. "As from January 2005,
repatriation will continue based only on individual requests from the
refugees," Pirjo Dupuy, the head of UNHCR in Eritrea told IRIN on Friday.
"All parties consider that there has been enough time and opportunity for
people to return through convoys. We cannot maintain this expensive system
indefinitely," she added.

Operating on a repatriation and reintegration budget of nearly US $10
million this year, UNHCR and its Sudanese and Eritrean partners, have
returned almost 120,000 refugees home by convoy since the exercise was
started four years ago. On arrival in Eritrea, the returnees are provided
with land by the government as well as financial assistance, materials for
building shelters, non-food items like cooking utensils and are exempted
from military service for a year.

[Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=42472 ]


ETHIOPIA: Potential humanitarian crisis in Somali region

A potential humanitarian crisis is looming in the Somali region of
southern Ethiopia where the long rains have failed and up to 1.3 million
people are likely to need emergency aid until the end of the year, the
United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
reported. According to preliminary assessments of the situation, lack of
water and pasture was widespread and crops had failed in 14 districts,
OCHA said in a humanitarian update released last week.

OCHA said an assessment by the Ethiopian Disaster Prevention and
Preparedness Commission in July had found a generalised failure of the Gu
(long) rains across the majority of zones in the region. The southern
areas were hardest hit by drought. Early warning alerts issued between May
and June had also indicated widespread failure of the Gu rains and aid
agencies, including Action Against Hunger, the International Committee of
the Red Cross and the UN Children's Fund, had warned of a developing
humanitarian crisis if measures were not taken to protect communities in
the region. [Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=42505 ]

SUDAN: UN, gov't sign deal on disarming militias in Darfur

The senior United Nations envoy to Sudan and the country's foreign
minister have signed an agreement committing Khartoum to take "detailed
steps" in the next 30 days to disarm the Janjawid militias accused of
attacking civilians in the western Darfur region. Under the agreement, the
Sudanese government would also improve security for the 1.2 million
internally displaced persons (IDPs) and alleviate the humanitarian crisis
there, a UN spokesperson said on Thursday.

The text of the deal between Jan Pronk, the Secretary-General's Special
Representative for Sudan, and Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail must
now be approved by the Sudanese Cabinet, Denise Cook told reporters in New
York. Pronk voiced hope that if the agreement was implemented, the
Security Council would see that Khartoum was making "substantial progress"
and decide not to take further action against Sudan, according to the
spokesperson.

[Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=42554 ]


SUDAN: UN to maintain pressure on Khartoum over Darfur

The United Nations will keep up pressure on the Sudanese government until
it meets its commitments to disarm the militias accused of committing
atrocities against civilians in Darfur and restore security there to
enable the estimated 1.2 million displaced people (IDPs) to return home,
Secretary-General Kofi Annan said. While there had been progress on
humanitarian access to remote Darfur, Khartoum had "much more" to do on
improving security for the IDPs who have gathered in over 100 makeshift
camps across the region, Annan told reporters in New York on Wednesday
after briefing the Security Council on his recent trip to Africa.

The Secretary-General stressed that last week's Council resolution
required the Sudanese authorities to do no more than meet the pledges it
has already made. "They should be able to take steps to calm the
situation, to stop the attacks, to protect the people and continue the
disarmament," he said. "And there should be no confusion or no excuses,"
he warned.

[full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=42526 ]


SUDAN: Thousands demonstrate in Khartoum

Thousands of protestors including Sudanese government ministers, religious
leaders and students, marched on Wednesday through the streets of the
capital, Khartoum, to demonstrate against "foreign interference" in the
troubled western Darfur region. The peaceful protest was organised by the
Organisation for the Protection of Faith and Nation - a grouping of trade
unions, student associations and religious organisations, sources said.

Starting in the morning from the city centre, the placard-waving crowd
later headed to the United Nations offices and handed over a letter.
Various Sudanese leaders addressed the gathering. Sources told IRIN in
Khartoum that the demonstrators, in their letter, demanded that the two
rebel groups fighting the Sudanese government in Darfur - the Justice and
Equality Movement (JEM) and the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army (SLM/A), be
disarmed immediately.

[Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=42511 ]


SUDAN: Darfur IDPs fear to go home due to insecurity and abuses - Deng

Contrary to Sudanese government assertions that the security situation in
the troubled western Darfur region has improved, civilians displaced by
the conflict insist that violence perpetrated by Janjawid militias is
continuing, a United Nations official said. Francis Deng, the UN
Secretary-General's representative on internally displaced persons (IDPs),
visited Darfur last week accompanied by Sudanese officials. He said the
IDPs talked of "persistent insecurity and human rights violations",
including "many accounts" of rape of women outside their camps.

"I found a situation of persistent insecurity and human rights violations
as the paramount concern of the displaced," Deng said in a statement on
Monday. "I was particularly concerned about many accounts and reports of
persistent rape of women outside the camps." "While most [IDPs] expressed
a desire to eventually return to their places of origin, they all strongly
affirmed their unwillingness to return at this stage due to prevailing
insecurity, mainly because of continued attacks by the so-called Janjawid
militia and other armed actors," he added.

[Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=42494 ]


SUDAN: Southern states facing nutritional emergency

The nutritional situation in southern Sudan has improved but it remains
above emergency levels due to food shortages, inadequate health services,
poor childcare practices and lack of water and sanitation services, an NGO
operating in the area reported. Despite the improvement, efforts were
still needed to detect and treat acute malnutrition among children in many
parts of the region, Action Against Hunger (ACF) said in an assessment of
data from 28 surveys done by various agencies.

"The surveys targeted children under five years of age," Sabrina Silvain,
ACF programme coordinator for South Sudan told IRIN on Tuesday. Each
survey, she added, screened 900 children in each of 15 counties of Upper
Nile, Bahr El Ghazal and Equatoria states. The data showed that the
average prevalence of global acute malnutrition (GAM) and severe acute
malnutrition (SAM) in 2003, were 20.8 percent and 3.6 percent
respectively. This appeared to suggest an improvement from 2002 when GAM
was 26 percent and SAM five percent, ACF said.

[Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=42491 ]


SOMALIA: Disputes delay formation of transitional parliament again

The inauguration of Somalia's transitional parliament was on Thursday
postponed to 19 August, after disagreements over nominees from various
clans once again delayed earlier plans to swear-in the MPs and launch the
assembly. Ministers from members states of the Inter-Governmental
Authority on Development (IGAD), who are mediating the talks in the Kenyan
capital, Nairobi, said in joint communique that they had given the clans
which had not yet submitted their lists of designated MPs, two days to do
so.

They urged the Somalia National Arbitration Committee, which is trying to
arbitrate the clan disputes at the ongoing reconciliation conference in
Nairobi, to "deal with the outstanding issues regarding the selection
process". The IGAD ministers had on July 19 said that they expected to
launch the parliament on 30 July. But that deadline could not be met
because some clans had failed to agree on how to divide the numbers of
seats allocated to them and who their MPs should be.

[Full story at:
http://www.irinnews.org/report.asp?ReportID=42550 ]


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