Russell Broadbent (McMillan, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

In his Faithworks blog in the Sunday Herald Sun on 16 March 2008, Bryan Patterson writes:

About 1.3 billion people now live in war zones. A child will die as the direct result of war in the time it takes you to read this sentence. Think about that. A child with a name and a personality. A child whose hope has been extinguished. About 26,500 of these children die every day from the effects of poverty and war. Meanwhile, the wise leaders of the world collectively spend $1.1 trillion on weapons. It might make you empathise with the words of Martin Luther. ‘If I was God, I’d kick this world to pieces,’ he said. Fortunately, God doesn’t do that.

The purpose of this motion is to draw attention to the desperate situation in Sudan’s Darfur region and to consider what Australia can do to help alleviate the situation. More than four years of armed conflict involving rebel groups, armed militia and government forces has resulted in an estimated 200,000 civilian deaths. Millions have fled their destroyed villages, many of them fleeing across the border into neighbouring Chad. More than 240,000 refugees from Darfur are being cared for by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and other agencies in camps along Sudan’s western border with Chad. The UNHCR is at present in the process of transferring another 13,000 refugees who crossed the border in recent weeks to escape an upsurge in fighting.

These camps are located in arid and remote areas which the UNHCR says would normally support no more than 20,000 people. Food aid has to be brought in to the landlocked Darfur region by overland convoys from Tripoli in Libya. The treacherous roads become inaccessible during the annual rainy season, which is rapidly approaching. If these natural hazards were not enough, armed rebel groups have taken to attacking the vehicles of the relief organisations. The UN’s World Food Program says that, as a result, it is transporting only half the food relief it normally would at this time of the year. Truck drivers are unwilling to risk making deliveries on the dangerous roads. Since the beginning of this year 45 trucks have been hijacked and 23 drivers are unaccounted for. This places greater reliance on the delivery of food aid by air. The World Food Program announced last week that this operation was also at risk because of lack of funds. Operations could not be guaranteed beyond the end of March. The operation has been temporarily reprieved by a contribution from Hollywood celebrities, led by actor George Clooney, but the World Food Program remains in urgent need of confirmed contributions from donor countries.

It has become abundantly clear that the only way of addressing this humanitarian tragedy is by an end to the fighting, but there appears to be little prospect of this given the recent upsurge of rebel activity. The situation is complicated by the unrest in Chad, where armed rebels have also tried to overthrow the government. There are also tensions between the Sudanese and Chadian governments, which have each accused the other of allowing rebel bases on their territory. There was a glimmer of hope last week when the two governments signed a peace agreement, but this has been dismissed by rebel factions and there is now a real concern that fighting in Darfur has entered a new and more deadly phase.

When African rebels launched their uprising against the Arab central government four years ago, there were two main rebel groups. The government responded by arming and supporting the Arab militia. Both the African rebel groups and the militia have since splintered and there are now as many as 16 competing factions involved in the violence. Agreement has been reached on the deployment of a combined United Nations African Union peacekeeping force of 26,000 in Darfur, but to date just over 9,000 have been deployed. In just over three months 800,000 members of the ethnic Tutsi community were slaughtered by rival Hutus. Already, 200,000 people have died in Darfur. We must act as part of the international community now to see that the bloodbath that was Rwanda is not repeated.

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