Sudanese Government Ends Aid
Recently the Sudanese government has asked various humanitarian aid organizations to stop helping the Sudan. President Bashir stated that he wanted all the international aid groups out during the course of the next year. Already thirteen organizations have been expelled from the Sudan. The thirteen organizations that were expelled were said to comprise over half efforts in Darfur. These organizations provided food, water, shelter, education, and health care to internally displaced people in Darfur. However, without these organizations being able to aid the IDPs more than a million people will go without those listed niceties mentioned above. So why kick out relief organizations that are providing a lot of good to people that are in desperate need of help.
The website that mentioned this information gave a reason for the push out of these aid organizations. The reason being that the kidnapping of three international aid workers raised tensions and that it is unsafe for those organizations to continue working in the region. However, I get the sense that there could be two other viable reasons for the President to be kicking these countries out of Darfur and the Sudan. The first reason is relief aid organizations can be seen as fueling the war. The reason behind that is that groups who provide international aid to not turn away anyone who comes for aid or help. So international relief organizations could literally be feeding the enemy that the government is trying to suppress. It is said that if organizations step back and do not provide aid to anyone then they could very possibly kill those who have started the conflict. The only dilemma behind that is do you let innocent people die because of the small population of the people that is causing the issue in the first place.
The second reason I see behind the whole ordeal of kicking out the relief’s organization other than safety reasons is the fact that the Sudanese government does not want to expose what is truly going on there and how bad and out of hand the situation is. It appears as though the country is trying to handle everything that is going on by just downplaying the situation. Perhaps the government just wants keep the outside from knowing what atrocities are really going on in the region, and the way in which accomplishing that is by kicking out the aid organizations.
It is a shame that the relief groups being in the Sudan is kind of a double-edged sword. Although they provide much aid to IDPs, they do not turn away those that that are causing the conflict, and could very well be the support in terms of food and water supply that keep the forces going. Perhaps the expulsion of the international aid groups in Darfur can help put an end to the genocide, but there is still the million people that need the support given by the organizations. Maybe even more people will die due to the lack of support. It just seems the way in which the government expelled the groups rather quickly seems to be rather disconcerting. It also seems like a happy medium in this case in unobtainable. I am unsure if the government is doing all it can to help aid all the internally displaced people, but time will tell if the government made the proper decision to stop incoming aid.
http://www.ushmm.org/genocide/take_action/atrisk/region/darfur-sudan/
