United Press International - January 27, 2005
William M. Reilly, UPI United Nations Correspondent

U.N. Undersecretary-General Jan Egeland, the U.N. emergency relief coordinator, who has called the African humanitarian crises "silent tsunamis," said since 1998 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo alone, 3.8 million people have been killed.

"This amounts to the toll of more than a dozen tsunamis," he said. "With an estimated 1,000 people dying in DRC every day, most due to easily preventable and treatable illnesses, a death toll of tsunami proportions is reached about every six months," said Egeland.

Wednesday he told reporters the Dec. 26 Asian catastrophe death toll was expected to leave more than 200,000 dead in 12 countries spread over thousands of miles of coastline.

"Some say that these situations are not comparable," the relief chief said, adding that donations in the last month must be built on. "We owe that to the millions of civilians in the (African) crises ... who are just as innocent and need our help every bit as much as the millions affected by the tsunamis."

Three-quarters of the $977 million U.N. emergency appeal for tsunami victims was reached almost immediately.

Egeland said nearly four-fifths of all recent U.N. humanitarian appeals have addressed African problems, but the response has been slow to nearly non-existent.

The response to consolidated appeals for Africa from U.N. agencies and non-governmental organizations last year ranged from 10 percent for Zimbabwe to less than 40 percent for the Central African Republic and Ivory Coast to around 75 percent for Sudan, Chad and Uganda, he said.

"I remember sitting in this very room last summer asking for five helicopters to save thousands of lives in Darfur," Sudan, Egeland told the panel of 15 ambassadors. "In the end, we had to hire helicopters commercially as no (U.N.) member states were willing to provide them."

After the tsunamis, he again appealed for helicopters for the Asian countries affected "and, within days, saw the deployment of several helicopter carriers," he said.

Some have pointed out no quick response would come to the victims of protracted armed conflicts in Africa because of a lack of security, but the international community should try its hardest, be innovative and quickly build on the response in the last four weeks to the tsunami disaster, said Egeland, who heads the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

In Darfur, "all sides are heavily armed, despite the arms embargo imposed by the (Security) Council last July," he said, severely limiting OCHA's ability to reach hundreds of thousands of people in need.

He said internally displaced persons continue to arrive in temporary camps every week -- or in some cases have to flee those camps and seek shelter elsewhere -- because of fresh attacks on towns, villages and camps. The situation is considered worst, he added, in South Darfur and West Darfur states with 100 people reported Thursday to have been killed in a government air force bombing raid on a North Darfur village.

Still, he said, "Without a doubt, the Security Council helped galvanize the attention and funding we were able to generate for the crises in Darfur and northern Uganda last year."

In December, the U.N. World Food Program managed to reach 1.5 million people, "a significant achievement, but still 500,000 less than the target for December," Egeland said.

Also Thursday, a spokeswoman for U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said the report from a commission of inquiry he appointed into whether genocide has occurred in Darfur has arrived at U.N. World Headquarters in New York and was expected to go to the Security Council next week.

Tens of thousands of people have been killed in Darfur and as many as 1.85 million people were internally displaced or have fled to neighboring Chad since rebel groups took up arms against Sudanese government forces in early 2003. Militias allied to the government were accused of carrying out numerous killings and rapes.

"What we have been witnessing in Darfur, large parts of Somalia, the Pool region of the Republic of Congo and several other conflict-affected parts of the continent is a deadly combination (of) insecurity, limited access and massive humanitarian needs that keep rising as we struggle to catch up," Egeland told the council.

"Apart from conflict, recurrent droughts continue to take their toll in the Horn of Africa," he said. "In Eritrea alone, some 2.2 million people out of a total population of 3.8 million need food assistance and the maternal malnutrition rate of 53 percent is among the highest in the world.

"Similarly, in Somalia and Ethiopia, successive seasons of drought have led to loss of assets," Egeland continued.

"Last but not least," he said, there is the AIDS pandemic.

"There are 6 million people in six countries in southern Africa who will be unable to meet their food needs this year, primarily as a result of the 'triple threat' of food insecurity, HIV/AIDS and weakened capacity for governance," Egeland said.

"Last year alone, AIDS caused close to 1 million deaths" in southern African, a region with 4 million orphans as a result of HIV/AIDS, "giving rise to the phenomenon of 'child-headed households,' left on their own," he said.

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