UNITED NATIONS: Jan Egeland, UN under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, says he is livid that the international donor community has brushed aside his appeal for 16.2 million dollars in emergency food assistance to Niger — as they have other urgent UN appeals for Africa. And he perceives a strong bias — this time based on language — is to blame in how donors decide who gets what. Egeland told reporters this week that overt discrimination percolates down to whether a country is French, Portuguese, or English-speaking.

He said that both French and Portuguese-speaking countries “are systematically lower on our funding tables than many of the English-speaking countries.” “We urgently appealed for help to Niger (a French-speaking country). But we still have zero commitments,” he added. “It shouldn’t be like that because we should give according to needs.

But that is not happening now,” he added. Of the 12 million people in Niger, about 3.6 million are caught in what the United Nations has termed an “acute food security crisis.” What little there was of food last year was consumed by an invasion of locusts and that was followed by one of the most severe droughts, resulting in no food production in the country.

Still, the international donor community has been painfully slow in responding to the ongoing crisis in Niger, Egeland said. But African activists and humanitarian organisations said they were not surprised over the lack of donor commitment to those of the world’s poorer nations that happen to lie in Africa — whether based on language or race. “The larger problem is that the global North looks at Africa as a basket case which will have no resolution,” Bill Fletcher, president of the Washington-based TransAfrica Forum, told IPS.

But, Fletcher said, this makes the work of the African Union (AU), which represents the interests of all 54 countries on that continent, so much more important. “The AU needs to develop operational ties with other regional blocs, such as the one that appears to be developing in Latin America at the initiative of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez,” Fletcher said.

The AU must also build strong connections with the African diaspora so that African migrants, expatriates, and descendants throughout the world can become a more energised force in support of African self-determined development. “We in the diaspora must advance the demands for debt cancellation and reparations,” Fletcher said by way of example. Egeland singled out Niger as “the number-one forgotten and neglected emergency in the world”.

But the larger problem is that “if you’re in Africa, you are systematically discriminated against with regard to our attention and our generosity and what we give,” said Egeland, who also is the UN’s emergency relief coordinator. Blasting Western donors for neglecting some of the world’s “forgotten emergencies” in Africa, he said “it’s a tremendous dilemma that 90 per cent of the attention is focused on 10 per cent of the affected disasters and wars in the world.”

Caroline Green of the aid charity Oxfam International said she agrees with Egeland’s criticism of donors and added that the lack of donor commitment to emergency needs applies even in English-speaking countries. Green, who returned recently from a tour of sub-Saharan Africa, said that millions of innocent civilians are trapped in incredibly difficult circumstances in Northern Uganda, Niger, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia and many other countries.

They are in desperate need of protection, or in some cases, the most basic of supplies including clean water and food. “Yet the majority of rich donor countries continue to fund on the basis of news headlines, not need,” she told IPS. “Last week in Northern Uganda, I met children who have lived in camps for years, walking miles each night to sleep in safety in the streets of the nearby town, and going back to their makeshift homes each morning to attend classes with over 300 other children,” she said.

These children represent the tip of an iceberg. —Dawn/IPS News Service