wfn.org | SUDAN: CALL TO HELP STARVING REFUGEES IN KENYA

[a.whitefield@quest.org.uk]

April 11, 1997
ANGLICAN COMMUNION NEWS SERVICE
Canon Jim Rosenthal, Director of Communications
Anglican Communion Office
London, U.K

[97.4.2.10]

SUDAN: CALL TO HELP STARVING REFUGEES IN KENYA

(CMS) The Church Mission Society in London has issued an urgent call for
prayer and practical help for 33,000 Sudanese refugees in northern
Kenya. The inhabitants of Kakuma camp are slowly dying of malnutrition
because their food rations have been cut to starvation level.

CMS General Secretary Diana Witts is called on the Society's supporters
to write to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
and the World Food Program, urging them to increase the frequency and
contents of refugee food baskets.  "We are gravely concerned that
displaced Sudanese, many of whom are fellow Anglicans, are dying when
they should be under UNHCR protection.  The quantity and quality of
their rations must be increased immediately."

CMS mission partner the Revd Marc Nikkel, who brought the situation to
the attention of the Society, says that worst hit are mothers, children
and the elderly.

Fr Nikkel reports that the Revd Mark Atem, a Sudanese Anglican who
serves in the camps, "refrains from going to his own family compound
during the day because he cannot bear his children pleading for the milk
he cannot give them."

The Kakuma Refugee Camp is located 100 kilometres from the Sudanese
border in northwest Kenya.  The refugees fled to Kenya in 1992 after
large areas of mostly Christian southern Sudan were attacked by the
National Islamic Front government in its war with the Sudan People's
Liberation Army (SPLA)

Among the refugees are the famous 12,000 children and young men, the
"lost children of southern Sudan" who had moved nomadically in southern
Sudan and Ethiopia for several years.