Children plead with Annan for UN food

CHEERING crowds and a brass band greeted UN chief Kofi Annan yesterday on his first visit to south Sudan, but he was also met with a stark message on the desperate need for aid in the war-battered region.

“Kofi, no food, hunger imminent,” read a banner held up by a small group of children on the roadside as his convoy passed along the dirt streets of Rumbek, the southern bastion of former rebel leader John Garang. The Khartoum government and Garang’s Sudan People Liberation Movement (SPLM) signed a deal in January to end a 21-year-old conflict that has left vast expanses of southern Sudan with virtually no infrastructure and precarious existence for many.

Donors promised $4.5 billion to bolster the peace deal at a conference in Oslo in April, but aid workers say donors are failing to send food needed to avert south Sudan’s worst hunger crisis since a 1998 famine in which at least 60,000 people died.

“The UN is here to help you implement that peace agreement,” Annan said after landing on Rumbek’s airstrip where crowds sang and some climbed trees to see him. Under a cloudy sky, the UN secretary-general was given a traditional gift of white bulls to symbolise peace. Annan said he would offer them to needy widows and orphans.

“So let us work together to rebuild and make life simple for everyone ... You have suffered for too long,” Annan told the crowd, before heading off for talks with Garang.

The southern conflict that erupted in 1983 claimed 2 million lives and spread across the south of the country, which has substantial oil reserves. However, relief agencies worry that calls for help in the south may be drowned out by appeals for another conflict in Sudan’s west.

On Saturday, Annan visited the western Darfur region where a more than two-year-old conflict has left tens of thousands dead and two million homeless.

Aid workers say growing hunger in the south will enflame localised conflicts over water and cattle and could complicate attempts by former rebels to implement the southern peace deal.

Under that deal, power and wealth will be split between the mainly Muslim north of the country and the largely Christian and animist south. But the south can also vote for secession after an interim period of six years, putting pressure on the Sudanese authorities to ensure southerners feel the benefits of peace.

“We have quite serious rates of malnutrition despite all the goodwill that was shown (by donors),” Ben Parker, spokesman for the UN humanitarian coordinator in Sudan, said.

A UN official said Annan would also discuss the deployment of a southern peacekeeping force during the three-day visit to Sudan. Some 10,000 peacekeeping troops, military observers and hundreds of civilian police have started deploying in Sudan, Africa’s largest country, to help shore up peace in the south.