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“35,000 displaced people hadn’t received any medical assistance for months”. Interview with Xisco Villalonga, medical coordinador in Tawila. In Darfur over the last year, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has been trying hard to reach the most isolated populations who, due to the increasing insecurity, have had no access to medical care. In August, a new project started in Tawila, a town in a region of North Darfur which is disputed over by various armed groups and where 35,000 displaced people are living. Trapped by insecurity, the people of Tawila hadn’t received any medical assistance for months before, amid an extremely unstable environment, MSF started to run mobile clinics in the camps. What situation did you find on your arrival in Tawila? The main camp is Rwanda, with 20,000 displaced people. It was set up in late 2005 after several attacks by Arab militias against Tawila and after that more displaced people arrived from other areas of Darfur. The older camp is Dali, set up in 2003. Around 10,000 people are living in this camp, and many of them come from the region surrounding Tawila, which means they can go back to their land from time to time. Finally there is the Argo camp, with approximately 3,000 displaced. All of them are long-term camps; you can see that the shelters are not as precarious as in more temporary settings. When we arrived, one of the main problems was water and sanitation as there were very few water points and latrines. But what really pushed us to intervene was the fact that this population of 35,000 hadn’t received any medical assistance for months because all humanitarian agencies had left due to insecurity, the last one in April. After months without receiving any assistance, what was the health
situation of the population? Security is another important issue. Most of the displaced cannot return home due to insecurity, there is still ongoing fighting in the region. We even see newly displaced people arriving here. It means people have no access to their land and rely totally on external aid. For them it’s dangerous to even go to Tawila for wood or water; there have been many incidents. How did MSF intervene? Did you face any difficulties? Our main challenges when we started the project were security and the analysis of the context. All NGOs working there have left due to insecurity, the last one in April, leaving the population without any assistance. We couldn’t start a project without understanding what is happening is the area, the dynamics among armed groups and the social dynamics inside the camps. We have done a lot of work on this by contacting all parties to the conflict, but it’s a permanent challenge. Since we started a month and a half ago we have already suffered several incidents and currently our team has been evacuated. It will return as soon as the security condition allows it, we hope soon. But it shows that the context of Tawila is very complex. We have made a lot of effort to get everybody to understand our principles of neutrality and impartiality, but we see that it’s very difficult to maintain a humanitarian space that allows us to keep on working and providing medical assistance to the population. Is the situation of Tawila similar to the rest of Darfur? There are many areas of Darfur that we could access in the past, but that we can no longer get to today. It was the case in Tawila: in the past several organizations used to work there, but one by one they had to leave due to insecurity and since April the population hadn’t received any assistance. Now we are trying to restart the project, but we see it’s difficult. You can find the same situation in many places of Darfur. » Read about other articles on Darfur
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