Niko Kyriakou

UNITED NATIONS, May 11 2005 (IPS) — U.N. Security Council consultations over humanitarian crises in Africa have boiled down to a familiar refrain: donors could stem the rising of death and disease simply by providing adequate funding for relief efforts.

”If we get more political attention, diplomatic pressure on parties, and more resources, many of the worst crises in the world that are in Africa can be solved,” Jan Egeland, the U.N. under secretary general for humanitarian affairs, told the council Tuesday.

Egeland’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) is appealing for three billion dollars for Africa.

The battle-wrenched Sudanese region of Darfur, he said, served as an example of how humanitarian investment by the international community had saved ”hundreds of thousands of lives” since last year.

”But in general, there is too little attention and there is too little investment,” he added.

Egeland briefed Security Council members on the status of a number of African emergencies that are not on the 15-nation committee’s official agenda.

Of 14 appeals for African crises, he said, eight have received less than 20 percent of the requested amount and, with the exception of Angola, none have received more than 40 percent.

”Too many people are dying because too little funding is available, or because it arrives too late in the year,” Egeland said.

”Let us agree on one fundamental issue,” he added. ”A human life has the same value wherever he or she is born. There should be the same attention to northern Uganda as to northern Iraq, the same attention to the Congo as there was to Kosovo, and that is not the case today.”

Egeland put particular emphasis on northern Uganda, where a ceasefire and peace negotiations aimed at ending a 19-year civil war between the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) and the Ugandan army broke down earlier this year.

Egeland said that increased violence and mutilations of civilians carried out by the LRA were causing fear and despair among the country’s 1.4 million internally displaced people, many of whom are living in overcrowded camps. The United Nations has received only 34 percent of the 54 million dollars it requested for humanitarian operations in Uganda.

Non-governmental organisations involved in humanitarian projects in Uganda also have accused the government there of failing to protect civilians.

”The LRA has committed horrific atrocities,” said Emma Naylor, country programme manager for the international charity Oxfam. ”But the military strategy employed by the government is not protecting its civilians. Instead, we are seeing increased suffering and numbers of civilian casualties.”

Ellen Margrethe Loj, current president of the Security Council, told IPS that the council plans to ”urge the parties and especially the northern resistance army to revert to the negotiation table.”

”That is the strongest call we can make on both parties,” she said.

Egeland, in a report to the council, painted a bleak picture across Africa and pointed to a ”triple threat” combination of drought, disease, and weak government.

In southern Africa, a quarter of a million people have died of AIDS since January, he said. News of crop failures, particularly in Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and parts of Mozambique, combined with a huge shortage of rainfall and the oncoming dry season are among the most worrying signs of a huge food crisis.

The World Health Organisation, which attempts to feed 5.5 million people in the region, has only received 15 percent of necessary funding, Egeland told the council. He also described food shortages in Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea.

In Chad, Egeland warned, political dialogue and control of arms and armed groups were needed to prevent a ”major crisis” resulting from the influx of some 200,000 refugees into the country from Darfur. Already, there have been reports of troops and armed groups gathering along the Chad-Sudan border, he said.

In Zimbabwe, tensions between the government and the donor community contributed to major funding cuts. And in Togo, violence following the presidential election triggered an outflow of more than 22,000 refugees to Benin and Ghana, Egeland said. Saying for greater security was needed in order to launch a humanitarian assessment mission, he called on the international community to support the African Union’s efforts to seek a peaceful resolution to the conflict.

Egeland did not directly address the reasons for funding shortfalls but told IPS that the media played an influential role in motivating donors to offer and make good on funding commitments.

He called Western media ”a good friend in some respects, as in Darfur, but very disloyal in giving us attention to other crises including that of northern Uganda or for that matter Togo at the moment, or Chad.”

”We’re trying desperately to get attention,” he added.

As to why northern Uganda had had received so much less media attention than Darfur, Egeland said that crises like those in Uganda were less palpable to the media due to their complexity.

”I unfortunately think that part of our problem is that it has to be easily comprehensible for the media to present it in a manner that gets a lot of attention,” he said.

A Western diplomat who represented his country in the Security Council last year told IPS on condition of anonymity that another difference is that Sudan has oil. Consequent media attention had driven donors to commit money to the humanitarian crisis there.

On the other hand, the diplomat added, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, generally regarded as a friend by the West, has sought to play down the conflict in his country and this served to slow donor commitments.