Aid bureaucracy, suspicion threaten to deepen S.Sudan crisis -MSF
Tue Apr 3, 2014 6:32pm GMT
* Little hope for peacemaking -Medecins sans Frontieres head
* Says donor states slower with emergency aid than in past
* Resentment among warring parties poses further obstacle
By Tom Miles
GENEVA, April 3 (Reuters) - The humanitarian crisis created by South Sudan's
civil war may well worsen this year because of the slow international
response and suspicions among warring parties of U.N. relief efforts, the
head of aid agency Medecins Sans Frontieres said on Tuesday.
More than 1 million people have been displaced since Dec. 15, according to
the United Nations, including 800,000 uprooted within South Sudan and
254,000 who have taken refuge in neighbouring states.
A ceasefire deal in January collapsed and negotiations in Addis Ababa have
failed to stop fighting between the government and rebels in the country,
which declared independence from Sudan in 2011 but has been plagued by
disorder since.
"There's very little hope that political talks will be successful in the
coming weeks or months. All indicates a civil conflict that is there to
last, unless there is an unexpected diplomatic success," Bruno Jochum,
director general of MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders, told
reporters in Geneva.
The biggest coming challenge would be providing food to replace crops that
would have been planted by the now displaced population. The planting season
is now and crops would normally be harvested in a few months' time, Jochum
said.
"We know that the peak of malnutrition comes through the summer usually, so
I would say there's still a few weeks or months to prepare this properly.
"So there has to be a significant acceleration of both emergency
preparedness but also simple disbursement of the means by the donors to the
organisations that can help."
SLOWDOWN IN EMERGENCY AID SPENDING
But aid donors are much slower to release emergency funds than was the case
20 years ago, he said, and donor governments were finding it very hard to
switch from providing development funds to humanitarian funding. So the
crisis may need to get much worse to trigger international aid, Jochum said.
"There's always much more reaction when (people are) seeing thousands of
critically malnourished children on TV, rather than putting money into
preventive distributions of food to avoid this kind of situation."
Emergency funding once accessible within days might now take 4-5 months to
arrive. And much of the aid effort is hobbled by an "obsession with
coordination" which has prioritised planning instead of physical
distribution of aid on the ground, he said.
In South Sudan, a further threat to aid is posed by the warring parties'
growing unhappiness with the U.N. mission in the country because of its
combined military, political and humanitarian dimensions, Jochum said.
"Already today flights and vehicles of the U.N. are either checked or
subject to even rejection, which is a growing problem," he said.
"As most organisations are totally dependent on U.N. logistics for their
humanitarian work, we see here serious risks for the delivery of assistance
in the months to come, and in the coming year, especially if this suspicion
of the U.N. was to translate into more active incidents."
The heads of two United Nations organisations - refugee agency chief Antonio
Guterres and World Food Programme chief Ertharin Cousin - were in South
Sudan's capital Juba on Tuesday.
They issued a statement saying that millions of lives could be endangered if
urgent action were not taken to end the conflict and support civilians.
They also discussed the crisis with President Salva Kiir and other
government officials, and received his commitment to facilitate humanitarian
assistance to all civilians in need, the UNHCR and WFP said in a statement.
(Editing by Mark Heinrich)