European states have warned the United
Nations that more than 800,000 people are cut off from aid and may be
starving in North-east Nigeria, contradicting government assertions that
a crisis has abated and rebuking the world body for failing to secure
access.......
Nigeria’s government has said this year
that an emergency in the North-east caused by a decade-long conflict
with Islamist fighters was easing, and efforts should shift from
humanitarian relief to longer term development aid.
But in a letter to directors of
emergency programmes at UN and other aid agencies, the European Union
(EU), Britain, France and Germany said the UN was failing to press home
the urgency of a disaster which had put children at risk of starvation.
“We are very concerned about urgent and
unmet humanitarian and protection needs in North-east Nigeria,” they
wrote. The UN mission in Nigeria must push the government to allow “the
rapid, unimpeded and unfettered humanitarian access to people in need of
life-saving assistance”.
The letter said 823,000 people were in
areas inaccessible to aid in Nigeria’s Borno State, the area worst
affected by the decade-long insurgency by the Boko Haram Islamist group
and its offshoot, Islamic State in West Africa.
Children who have left the area over the
past 11 months had shown critical levels of malnutrition, said the
letter, reviewed by Reuters.
The European countries, all major donors
to the relief effort, called for “stronger, strategic and consistent
advocacy with the Government of Nigeria to uphold their responsibility
to protect and assist their citizens”.
The letter was sent to directors of emergency programmes through a body called the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC).
The IASC referred queries about the
letter to the UN office in Nigeria. A spokeswoman there said on Monday
she was preparing a response, but she had not provided one by Tuesday
evening. Representatives of the Nigerian presidency did not respond to a
request for comment.
Nigeria’s call for a change in emphasis
in the North-east away from emergency aid and towards long-term
development assistance fits a narrative long expressed by President
Muhammadu Buhari that the conflict is waning.
Buhari won election in 2015 on a vow to
defeat Boko Haram and restore stability and security to the North-east,
and is now seeking a second-term campaigning on his government’s success
in achieving it.
As part of that effort to portray the
North-east as safer, thousands of people have been ordered back to
dangerous areas that aid agencies say are inaccessible, and where the
condition of hundreds of thousands of people is unknown.
A person familiar with the drafting of
the letter said the countries that signed it were trying to express “a
lack of confidence in UN leadership in Nigeria”.
“People are nearing starvation and there
is little help for those being returned to inaccessible areas. And the
humanitarian situation is escalating not getting better.”(Reuters)
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