Possibility of epidemic joins violence as threat in Sudan

By Marc Lacey
The New York Times

KAREL PRINSLOO / AP A Sudanese refugee cries after she and her family reached the safety of Bahai on the Chad border earlier this month. They had been hiding in the hills in Sudan's Darfur province for nearly a year.

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Days after Powell and Annan ended their tour, witnesses said, gunmen stormed a girls' school in the desert region of Darfur, chained a group of students together and set the building on fire. The charred remains of eight girls were still in shackles when military observers from the African Union arrived on the scene.

That is a gruesome reminder of the kind of violence the Sudan government has promised to stop by reining in the Janjaweed militias that it once encouraged when the government's focus was on quelling a civil war that swept Darfur. But since the visits, the killing and raping continue, and health conditions are more dangerous.

The government is offering a show of force, sending in police officers who were on display here, lined up in formation and marching in place.

But the Arab militias have continued to drive the black African residents of Darfur from their villages, although aid workers say the rate may have slowed. What progress there has been is hard to determine in a region that is so vast and inaccessible.

Even if the marauding and killing can be controlled, sickness and starvation are taking their toll. There is now the threat of an epidemic that could cause more deaths than the months of violence.

Many are like the two children whose hearts recently stopped beating as Dr. Jerry Ehrlich held the children in his arms. Both were chronically malnourished, sapped of their strength over time.

"We're trying to save as many kids as we can," said Ehrlich, a New Jersey pediatrician working for Doctors Without Borders at the sprawling Kalma camp outside Nyala. He sat on a straw mat in front of a long line of mothers, each of whom cradled a weak baby in her arms.

Nobody knows how many bodies have been buried beneath Darfur's hard earth since violence broke out in early 2003. Estimates begin at 30,000 and go up. In recent weeks, though, graves are being dug faster than ever, relief workers say, because of disease, not guns.

Most experts predict that the situation in Darfur will get much worse. The Agency for International Development has estimated a death toll of about 300,000 by year's end, even if the aid response is swift, and up to a million casualties if it is slow. The World Health Organization's estimates are lower, but it projects 10,000 deaths a month if infectious diseases break out.

The government told Powell and Annan that it would disarm the Janjaweed and bring a modicum of security to Darfur.
 
But pulling in the militias is easier said than done. The challenge is magnified because Darfur is about as big as France and lawless even in the best of times.

The government is eager for the Darfur problem to go away and wants to escape from the international condemnation it has received. But its more important goal is to stay in power. That is why it encouraged the militias to put down the insurrection in Darfur.

Hopes of ending that insurrection soured yesterday when two rebel groups, the Justice and Equality Movement and the Sudanese Liberation Army, walked out of peace talks in Ethiopia, primarily because the government had failed to fulfil its promise to disarm the Arab militias.

In Nyala, the capital of one of the three provinces in the Darfur region, government officials said they now controlled a 25-mile radius outside of town. Soon, the security zone will reach out 60 miles, officials said, which is still a tiny portion of Darfur.

"Colin Powell is asking us to collect the arms in Darfur in five days," Ahmed Bilal Osman, the Sudanese health minister, said during a tour of Darfur last week. "Let me ask him: The USA in Iraq, they are a superpower — can they collect the arms in Fallujah?"

Material from The Associated Press is included in this report.