Red Cross launches Darfur appeal

An urgent appeal to help tens of thousands of people struggling to survive in refugee camps in Darfur has been launched by the British Red Cross.

The aid agency said it was providing food, water, shelter and household items to more than 100,000 people at the remote Gereida camp to the south of the crisis-torn region.

The British Red Cross, led by the International Committee for the Red Cross, is also running special programmes to feed children suffering from malnutrition in the camp.

Around two million people have fled their homes as a result of the four-year long conflict in western Sudan and are displaced within the region. Thousands more have escaped into the neighbouring country of Chad, where they are struggling to survive.

Leigh Daynes, a British Red Cross spokesman who has just returned from South Darfur, said: "The conflict in Darfur has unleashed a cycle of violence that seems unstoppable.

"While the families caught in the crossfire of this conflict wait for a political solution to their plight, the British Red Cross is keeping people alive."

In Gereida camp, the Red Cross is handing out monthly food rations including lentils, sorghum, oil and sugar to the 100,000 camp residents, along with blankets, tarpaulins, clothes and kitchen equipment.

The aid agency is also building 1,000 toilets and running four water boreholes, providing mosquito nets and birth delivery kits, planting trees for firewood and to prevent environmental degradation and supporting an immunisation programme for meningitis, measles and polio.

The charity said £4 would feed a critically malnourished child for a week. A week's supply of oral rehydration salts for 100 children costs £35.

To donate to the British Red Cross Darfur appeal, call 0845 054 7206 or go to www.redcross.org.uk/darfurappeal.

© Independent Television News Limited 2007. All rights reserved.