UN refugee chief in Darfur trip

By Jonah Fisher
BBC News, El Geneina, west Darfur

Guterres is due to visit refugee camps in Chad

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, has visited a camp of displaced people in Sudan's western Darfur region.

Residents in Riyadh camp told Mr Guterres, a former Portuguese prime minister, that it was still too dangerous for them to return home.

Darfur has been relatively calm for the last six months.

But despite a recent drop in violence, more than two million of Darfur's people are still homeless.

This was Mr Guterres' first trip to Darfur as the UN high commissioner.

At Riyadh camp, he walked through the makeshift settlement of sticks, thatch and plastic sheeting and spoke to community leaders.

Security has not improved, they told him. Women are still being raped and Arab militia are preventing them going home.

Waiting to return

Mr Guterres said the United Nations would only begin to think seriously of returns once a peace deal between the government and rebels was in place.

Funding, he said, posed a serious problem.

"All agencies are under-funded," he said.

"Darfur became forgotten. It's very important that people understand that to solve the problem of Darfur - to solve the global problem of Sudan - is a key element now for stabilisation and progress within this huge region."

Mr Guterres now heads across the border to Chad, where 200,000 Darfuris are in camps.

He will then go south, where a peace deal means hundreds of thousands of Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda may soon be able to go home.