By: Eric Reeves

Civilians and humanitarians remain caught amidst uncontrolled violence, with no prospect of meaningful international protection

Despite desperate pleas from both civilians and aid organizations, in Darfur as well as in eastern Chad, security continues to deteriorate badly in the greater humanitarian theater---threatening lives, livelihoods, and all humanitarian operations. Nor is there any prospect of an adequate or timely international protection response to these deepening, inter-related security crises. Ethnically-targeted violence on both sides of the Chad/Darfur border, growing directly out of the Khartoum regime’s genocidal counterinsurgency war, has created a conflict-affected population of over 4.5 million human beings. Hundreds of thousands of these people will die in the coming months and years. A cataclysm of human destruction has begun that simply cannot be halted, though of course it might still be substantially mitigated. But the approximately 500,000 people who have already died from violence, disease, and malnutrition over the past four years of conflict provide a ghastly metric for future human destruction (see my two-part mortality assessment of April/May 2006 at http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article102.html and http://www.sudanreeves.org/Article104.html).

Humanitarian access to these desperate populations is contracting at an alarming rate. Read more >>>