responsibility to protect civilians

Five international aid agencies are calling world leaders at today’s Sudan summit to take concrete action to help ensure peace, safety and development for all Sudanese people. Failure to act risks a new eruption of violence and threatens the future of Africa’s largest country.

Civilians still are at risk in Darfur, aid agency says

El Fateh Osman, Oxfam's country director in Sudan said:

Each and every peacekeeper is still needed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, aid agency Oxfam said today (28 May) as the United Nations Security Council renewed the mandate of MONUC, the UN peacekeeping force in the country.

Major conflict could return to southern Sudan unless there is urgent international action to save the peace agreement that ended one of Africa’s longest and deadliest wars, ten aid agencies warned today.

Oxfam was pleased to hear that the new US strategy for Afghanistan will support ministries and local leaders that deliver for the Afghan people and combat corruption, and that there will be more focused assistance on agriculture, as up to 80 percent of Afghans rely on agriculture to survive.

The Congolese government’s military operation in eastern Congo, Kimia II, backed by UN peacekeepers and aimed at neutralizing the threat from a Rwandan Hutu militia group, the FDLR, has resulted in an unacceptable cost for the civilian population.

Oxfam and a coalition of NGOs reveal death toll reaches 2.1 million in three years of talks about talks. Talks to establish an effective international treaty on the trade in conventional arms are going at a snail’s pace because of some major arms exporters.

International aid agency Oxfam today called for “zero-tolerance” toward sexual violence committed by all armed groups in Colombia. Thousands of women have been raped and sexually abused during the armed conflict, but the vast majority of perpetrators are not held to account for their crimes.

Over 1.4 million people have been forced to flee their homes so far this year as a result of significant increasing violence in DR Congo, Sudan and Somalia, international agency Oxfam said today, as heads of state gather at the AU Summit in Libya to discuss peace and security across the continent.

As thousands of families continue to flee their homes in northwest Pakistan amid clashes between government forces and organized armed groups, Oxfam International has begun providing emergency relief to around 175,000 women, men and children in urgent need of assistance.