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.