Darfur camp blockaded, partly abandoned; malaria outbreak ‘likely’
The government is still preventing aid organizations from accessing Kalma Camp for internally displaced persons in South Darfur, said United Nations officials. The blockade, which began 2 August, has shut down a feeding programme for children under five years of age, all professional medical care, and distributions of food and fuel supplies for water pumps. Large parts of the camp are abandoned following recent violence there, but an estimated 50.000 people still remain, according to the officials. Additionally, peacekeepers said that an exchange of gunfire took place in Kalma Camp on Wednesday night.
The government is still preventing aid organizations from accessing Kalma Camp for internally displaced persons in South Darfur, said United Nations officials. The blockade, which began 2 August, has shut down a feeding programme for children under five years of age, all professional medical care, and distributions of food and fuel supplies for water pumps. Large parts of the camp are abandoned following recent violence there, but an estimated 50.000 people still remain, according to the officials. Additionally, peacekeepers said that an exchange of gunfire took place in Kalma Camp on Wednesday night. The risk of a malaria outbreak is high. Today the United Nations-African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID) stated that “heavy rains, stagnant water, and the lack of shelters and mosquito nets have added to growing concerns of a likely outbreak of infectious diseases, especially malaria” in Kalma.
“Large regions of the settlement appeared deserted,” UNAMID reported after sending a fact-finding team to Kalma on Tuesday, 10 August. The inhabitants left for surrounding villages, the town of Nyala, or the peacekeepers’ nearby policing centre. Eleven villages near Nyala are hosting refugees from Kalma in “dire conditions, especially in sanitation, health and education,” according to the peacekeepers’ statement. That finding was based on reports by inter-agency mission that visited the 11 villages from August 4th to 8th.
Samuel Hendricks, a spokesman for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Sudan, told an UN news source that the government blockade has prevented blanket feeding for children under five, which was scheduled to start at the beginning of August, and general food distribution this week.
A conservative estimate by the UN World Food Programme put the number of residents of Kalma Camp – before the outbreak of violence on 25 July — at about 82.000. Other UN sources estimated the population at 100.000. About 5.000 of the camp’s residents are now taking refuge near UNAMID’s Community Policing Center (CPC). The peacekeepers admitted that these people are “without adequate shelter during the rainy season.”
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