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http://www.guardian.co.uk/sudan/story/0,14658,1438471,00.html
180,000 die from hunger in Darfur
Deadlock on sanctions as UN reveals toll from starvation and disease
Jeevan Vasagar in Nairobi and Ewen MacAskill
Wednesday March 16, 2005
The Guardian
More than 180,000 people have died from hunger and disease during the last 18 months of the Darfur conflict, the United Nations said yesterday, as negotiations continued at its New York headquarters to break the deadlock on a new security council resolution to impose sanctions on the Sudanese government.
Brian Grogan, a spokesman for Jan Egeland, the UN emergency relief coordinator, said an average 10,000 Sudanese civilians were dying a month, much higher than earlier estimates. They were victims mainly of starvation or of disease in refugee camps after being driven from their villages by Sudanese soldiers and government-backed Janjaweed militiamen. The estimates exclude those killed in the fighting.
Khartoum accused the UN of producing the figures as a ploy to get the security council to take action against Sudan, and demanded evidence to back up the numbers.
The Sudanese foreign minister, Mustafa Osman Ismail, said: "Jan Egeland was here - I met him [and] he never mentioned this number."
Mr Egeland said last week that an estimate of 70,000 was too low but did not indicate what he regarded as a more realistic figure.
Nearly a year after the UN described Darfur as the world's worst humanitarian crisis, there is no sign the scorched-earth campaign against black African villages is over...