1:15 P.M. EDT
Real Audio of Briefing
MR. DENIG:Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the Foreign Press Center for this important briefing on the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Western Sudan. We are pleased to have three experts here today for this briefing and we welcome them here. First, Andrew Natsios, the Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development, then Roger Winter, the Assistant Administrator of AID for Democracy, Conflict and Humanitarian Assistance, and thirdly we have Ambassador Rannenberger, who is, at the Department of State, the Special Advisor on Sudan. Mr. Natsios will provide some opening remarks and then will be glad to take your questions.
Mr. Natsios.
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Thank you very much. Today is Tuesday. Wednesday -- is it Wednesday or Thursday -- Thursday. Thursday? No, the date of the conference is now Thursday. Right.
On Thursday, the United Nations has called a meeting of donors and of people in the region to a conference on the crisis in Darfur to see if we can coordinate both our logistical and operational systems and our policy perspective on what needs to be done to run the relief effort before there's a large-scale loss of life. This, unquestionably, is the most serious humanitarian crisis in the world today in terms of the number of people at risk and in terms of their condition.
Right now, the United States has contributed $95 million since February of last year, when the conflict started in its current phase, toward the relief effort. 30,000 tons of wheat are now being off-loaded in Port Sudan from our ship, to be loaded onto trucks, to be sent out to the region. We will provide even more resources in the future.
We need three things to make this relief effort successful to avoid the large-scale loss of life: One is access. There are areas of Darfur which are remote, and once the rains come in June, many of these will be difficult to access from the ground because of the road system not being in very good shape and the wadis [valleys] filling up with rainwater that will make it very difficult to get through. And so it's very important during the month of June that we build up food stocks to make sure people can survive, since many of their crops have either been destroyed or they have -- were not permitted to, because of the conflict, plant them.
The second problem is the Jinjaweed militia continues to commit atrocities, albeit on a reduced scale than they were prior to the peace agreement that was signed between the rebels and the government in N'Djamena, Chad, several months ago. So protection of non-combatants to allow them to receive relief commodities so they can survive.
And the third is this -- whether we have sufficient resources and the mechanisms to distribute assistance in the area.
So, if we have these three things, we can avoid a catastrophe. If we do not, we will have a very large-scale loss of life by this fall. People are already beginning to die in some of the camps, so I'd be glad to take questions.
QUESTION: Thank you. Ahmed El Bashir from Sudan, Sudan News Service.
Last week in this room, I thanked Secretary Powell and the Bush Administration for their policy of facilitation and coaching the Sudanese peace, and I think that the Sudanese thanks and gratitudes are also in order to you AID people, USAID people also, and my question is: Sudan Government has finally departed from the policy of denial of human rights violation and grudgingly, now it is issuing visas and permits for people to move. And I think that this is the policy to be followed -- the same thing in Naivasha -- not to condemn, not to take side and I think it is finally beginning to give some fruits, and so what are you going to do in that order, especially I hear some voices in the media and the Congress who are reverting back to Clinton Administration policy of attacking and criticizing instead of trying to make the people -- I'm saying this because I know that there are some hardliners on the Sudanese Government part and also on the rebel part. And so we need to have some kind of moderation and to deal with them so we can help the moderates come out. Thank you very much.
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Well, first, we have been talking to both sides: the rebels and the government from the beginning of this year to urge restraint, one, and to offer our support as a government toward at least a humanitarian ceasefire so relief supplies can be provided to anybody affected in the war on either side of the border, in Chad, or in Darfur. We continue to do that. The United States did help broker the peace agreement that's now in effect, even though it's a temporary one -- a ceasefire, signed a ceasefire agreement -- and that is going to make the relief effort possible.
We have been critical, though, when we think criticism is necessary. The government has reversed its position in the last couple of weeks in terms of access, and they are beginning, it appears, to begin to put some constraints in some areas on the Jinjaweed militia. But until that's general across the province, then we still have a problem with the protection of people in order to get these relief supplies. So we've come a ways. Some of the ceasefire agreements have been implemented. Other parts of it have not been implemented. We want all of the agreements on both sides to be implemented so we can stop the needless loss of life of civilian bystanders to this conflict.
But I think everybody needs to be held accountable. If the Sudanese Government does things that violate the agreement that they signed, we need to call them to task for it. If the rebels do the same thing, we need to do that.
It does appear that the central government has taken some decisions recently, as I just said, that reverses access. However, some of those decisions have not yet made their way down the bureaucratic chains to the provincial authorities because we're still having trouble in some cities in some of the province in order to get access. So I know -- I've worked in Sudan for 15 years -- I know sometimes decisions are made in Khartoum that are always not completely communicated down to the grassroots level and it takes a while to do that. We hope that will happen quickly, but we're running out of time. We're running out of time. And the more people who die, the more bitter will be the memories, the more difficult it will be to have a political settlement. The only solution to the conflict in Darfur is a political solution negotiated freely by both sides, but the more people who suffer, the more difficult that will be to achieve in the short term.
Yes, sir.
QUESTION: Thomas Gorguissian, An-Nahar, Lebanon.
Sir, you mentioned the three challenges that you are facing now. Can you elaborate little bit, especially when there is this time factor in it, which is June and the rain? And to complete these three steps to be taken to save lives, what you are expecting on Thursday from this meeting, because, you know, it's different organization, different agendas and different purposes of justifying their existence?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: I think it's important that we not have the donor governments giving mixed signals to either side in the conflict. We need to all say the same thing because if you all urge them to do different things, you confuse people in terms of the Sudanese Government or the rebel movement, and that's not helpful. So we need a unified donor voice, a unified NGO voice, a unified UN voice so that it's clear what's being expected in terms of these three things: It is to comply with the provisions of the accords that were signed in N'Djamena.
They signed the agreement. We didn't force them -- we urged them to do it, but they negotiated this agreement, and both sides signed it. We want the agreement implemented. If the agreement is implemented as it's written, we will have access and protection.
Resources are our problem. We have to come up with those resources. The United States has already provided 55 percent of the resources going into Darfur as a country, so we're very committed to this. I have assured Vice President Taha when I visited him last fall, and when I saw him a couple of months ago in Naivasha, when we were talking about the north-south, of course, we also discussed Darfur, and I said, "If you provide the protection from the Jinjaweed, and you provide access and eliminate the problems that we're having with visas and with travel permits, then we can do our work and we will work together. But if those things aren't dealt with, we can't do our work." So I promised, for our government, that we would provide the resources necessary to help eliminate the prospect of famine in Darfur.
QUESTION: Patrick Jarreau, Le Monde.
There are, as you mentioned, several voices, there are people in Washington saying that the French Government has been encouraging the Sudanese Government not to implement the (inaudible) agreement. Are you aware of that and what do you think of it?
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: I'm aware of the discussions on that issue and the discussions that took place several months ago. I think it's clear from our discussions with the French Government now that the French Government and the United States Government agree on objectives and agree in much of what is wrong and what needs to be corrected. Will we always agree on all tactics? Probably not, but I've found in the last month or so that the French Government has been very much in partnership with us at the United Nations and in Europe on these issues. There may have been disagreements earlier, but that's behind us.
QUESTION: El Bashir again. Are you optimistic at this stage, this month -- and I would like to hear also from the (inaudible) because he -- he always comes with numbers, and if is --
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: On Darfur or the south?
QUESTION: On Darfur.
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: On Darfur.
QUESTION: On the south, too.
ADMINISTRATOR NATSIOS: Yes, well, we have 200,000 people now in Chad. The State Department Refugee Office is providing substantial assistance to that population and the UN is beginning to mobilize.
The rest of the population, 8- or 900,000, are in Darfur, who are internally displaced, and what's happening now is a lot of people who are displaced but were not in camps are moving toward camps, and they're becoming overwhelmed with them. So there are serious logistical problems in getting to these people within the next four weeks.
Things are improving in terms of the things that I mentioned earlier: protection, access and resources, but we're not there yet, and we're running out of time. So there's a time problem here that's very, very important.
Am I optimistic? I'm not optimistic. I am simply waiting for evidence to see that things are progressing. So I'm neither pessimistic nor optimistic; I'm a realist, at this point.
Yes, did you want to say something, Roger? Go ahead.
MR. WINTER: You raised the numbers issue, and as some of you know, USAID has articulated some numbers as to what we think are the expected mortality rates from the situation in Darfur. These are not done willy-nilly. These are done by epidemiologists that are on our staff that work primarily on African famine issues and have done so for a long period of time. So while they are estimates, they're not wild, unfounded estimates whatsoever.
What we indicated in congressional testimony a month or so ago, whenever it was, is that given the access available to us on April 1, we could anticipate about 350,000 deaths from the circumstances as they existed at that point in time. Now, we are more or less 60 days later. That was April 1st; this is June the 1st. And what we are finding, but only based on samples, not on a comprehensive, is that the global acute malnutrition rates are actually running higher than we projected back at the beginning of April.
Now, people question, and they say, "Okay, if the access is improving and if the government is being more cooperative, can't you save all those lives? Can't you just sort of instantaneously get in there and do what needs to be done?"
Well, first of all, as Andrew indicated, we are seeing improvements in access, but that doesn't mean we have anything close to 100 percent access. It's also the case that the accumulation of problems is continually layered on each other, so you're talking about people who have been already displaced from their home areas in some cases for maybe nine months, but in most cases at least six months. When they are displaced like that, they are almost, by definition, immediately dependent. They were dependent in a context in which there was no access for a long period of time. That takes the toll on the human body over a long period of time, or over a period of months.
So the situation that you need to understand is that in south Darfur the rains have already begun. By some point during this month, all of Darfur will be subject to rains. What does that mean for this population that has not been being fed properly for, in most cases, three, four, five months, maybe up to nine months, okay, where their body is already weakened? Well, these are people who are not in their homes. They are in camps. They are in camps in an area where there are not shelters for them. Usually, the local shelter would be something that's put together out of grass, but this is a relatively arid area so there isn't a lot of grass around. What that means is that people are out there exposed. The rains occur in a context in which there is very little in the way of sanitation. There are no latrines. There wasn't access to do proper kinds of latrine building widely over the area.
And so you've got a combination of weakened human beings in an exposed situation, without shelter, without sanitation, and the rains come. That's where you get your body counts. That's why we are so urgent about the way we express ourselves sometimes when it comes to the situation there.
It is true we are getting improvements now, but improvements now count like this as compared to what improvements earlier on might have done in terms of the saving of people's lives.
So the consequences of this picture I'm trying to paint for you now is that there will be a substantial body count even if the government does everything right from here on out.
QUESTION: Are people beginning to return?
MR. NATSIOS: No. As a matter of fact, more people are going across into Chad and more people are coming into to the cities from the countryside because they don't think things are safe. There are some areas where the government is trying to get people to go back to their villages, but they're reluctant to do that because there's no security and they don't want to get attacked again by the Jinjaweed.
MR. DENIG: Thank you very much.
