"Major protection crisis" in Darfur - UN mission

Reports of rape are still rife in Darfur, western Sudan, perpetrators of abuses act with impunity, and civilians are being pressured to return to insecure areas, a UN team said on Monday. "There is a major protection crisis in Darfur in general. All the agencies confirm that, and so do the IDPs [internally displaced persons] we saw," Dennis McNamara, special adviser on displacement to the UN Emergency Relief Co-ordinator, told IRIN. "There is still undue pressure by the authorities for the displaced to return to unsafe areas, while general insecurity continues around the settlements," added McNamara, who is also the director of the Inter-Agency Internal Displacement Division of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). McNamara, who led a three-member mission to Darfur last week, said that sexual violence and rape were still a major concern there. He said the overall response to sexual crimes had been ineffective and perpetrators acted with impunity. "There has been no serious attempt to prosecute," said McNamara, whose mission visited IDP camps in four locations in South Darfur - Kass, Kalma, Nyala and Otash - on 25 and 26 August. Services for rape victims inadequate McNamara said that services for treating victims of rape were inadequate and he urged aid donors to fund protection projects for IDPs. He explained that Sudanese law required rape victims to report the crime before seeking treatment in government health facilities, but most of those who had been violated had no confidence in the local police or were too ashamed to tell the predominantly male force about their ordeal. "This crisis in protection needs urgent attention by [UN] agencies, NGOs, Sudanese authorities and donor governments," said McNamara. Ceasefire observers that the African Union has deployed in Darfur "also need to exercise a robust monitoring and verification role," he added. McNamara said most of the rapes occurred when women and girls ventured out of the camps to collect firewood. Men told his mission, which included human rights adviser Bjorn Pettersson and IDP adviser Beatrice Bernhard, that they could not help the women fetch firewood because they risked being shot if they went out into the bushes. McNamara said that local officials continued to refute the existence of sexual violence and rape despite the many documented cases. The rapists were "men in military uniform", IDPs said Displaced civilians told the mission that "men in military uniform" were responsible for the sexual violence, according to Pettersson. "There is no indication that the armed militia have been brought under control," said McNamara, adding that IDPS were still terrified of the militias, known as Janjawid. The Janjawid, allegedly allied to government troops, have been blamed for many of the abuses against civilians in Darfur. McNamara said that there was no "realistic early return" to original villages envisaged for the "traumatised" IDPs because attacks were still being reported outside the camps and more people were still seeking refuge in the IDP settlements. The conflict in Darfur erupted early last year when rebels took up arms against the government in a bid to end what they said was marginalisation and discrimination by the state. IDPs returning in droves to the south McNamara's mission reported that Darfur had overshadowed the problem of people displaced by civil war in southern Sudan who had began to return to their home areas from the north in anticipation of a final peace deal between Khartoum and the southern-based rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army. An estimated 100,000 people had returned to areas in the south that lacked basic services and where their security could not be guaranteed, McNamara said. He added that UN agencies working in southern Sudan estimated that another 100,000 IDPs could go back to the south before the end of the year. "Agencies need to step up their presence in the south in anticipation of the large number of people returning to the south," McNamara said, "and donors need to support this presence."