Lawlessness endangers aid operations in Darfur

AL-FASHER, Sudan — Deteriorating security conditions in Darfur — a vast region of Sudan that is equal in size to France — are endangering the largest humanitarian aid operation in the world.

Today, aid convoys have become almost daily targets, with carjackings, armed robbery and occasional shootouts. In some cases, aid workers have been forced to abandon their operations in far-flung camps; in other cases, they have been forced to travel by helicopter, increasing the cost of bringing crucial food, shelter and medical assistance to nearly 4 million people.

Sudan has agreed in principle to allow in U.N. peacekeeping forces, but the troops are not expected to arrive until next year.

"We can't distribute food if we're being shot at, basically, but when you're feeding millions of people, failure is not an option and security is deteriorating," says Simon Crittle, a spokesman for the World Food Program. "When you know who the rebels are, and who the government is, you can negotiate with them to get a food convoy through on a certain date. But when you don't know who's who, anyone can pull a gun and demand money, it makes it that much more dangerous."

Crittle says that food deliveries continue to get through to the majority of relief camps — with nearly 2.1 million metric tons of food being distributed annually by truck to more than 450 locations. But the increasingly blurry lines between militant and bandit has made it much more difficult to get food to people in need.

International aid workers say that the Darfur conflict has turned a corner from the neat-and-easy lines of government-backed Arab militiamen versus black rebels, and Sudan's ethnic cleansing policies that the U.S. government has called "genocide." Today, the lines between friend and foe have blurred considerably, making the efforts to resolve the conflict and to help noncombatants all the more difficult.

"The way it is portrayed, to say that this is Arab versus black, may have been true at the start, but it is much more complex now," says Alun McDonald, spokesman for Oxfam in Khartoum. "You have Arab tribes fighting the government, you have black tribes fighting each other."

With three rebel groups splitting up into more than a dozen groups — many of them based on personal or tribal loyalties — armed groups have taken to robbing the relatively soft target of aid workers, who have many of the vehicles, money and communications equipment that an armed movement needs.