Alice in Wonderland Helpfully Explains Aid Work in Darfur

Alice: "It's no use trying; one can't believe impossible things."

The Queen: "I dare say you haven't had much practice. When I was your age, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

It wouldn't be a week without a Darfur kerfuffle.  On Thursday, John Holmes - everyone's favorite-named UN official - announced that four of the aid agencies expelled by the Sudanese Government in March would be allowed to return, albeit "under new names and logos."

For instance, CARE USA would return as CARE Switzerland, and Mercy Corps would return as Mercy Corps Scotland.

Fine, well and good. Save for the minor, inconvenient fact that the Sudanese Government had earlier vowed never to allow said agencies to return.

As a senior Sudanese official announced in March: "The decision of the government of Sudan is a legitimate sovereign decision which we will never reverse, and this should not be a issue for discussion."

The Sudanese Government evidently had no problem cutting a deal to allow aid agencies to return; that said, being publicly exposed as hypocrites was something else again.

(Yet further proof that one should never speak in absolutes.  Especially if you have something of a history of tacking towards the wind.)

As a spokesman from the Sudanese Foreign Ministry rushed to reiterate on Friday: "The government position on this is very clear. These groups will not return to Sudan either using their names or other new ones."

At which point something of a mad scramble ensued, as everyone tried to explain that the new NGOs were completely, utterly separate from those NGOs which had been expelled, unfortunate naming-similarities aside.

First, the UN clarified that it didn't actually mean that any of the expelled agencies were actually returning:

"The four NGOs referred to in the reports should not be characterized as 'returning' NGOs. While from related organizational families, they are not the same, and have been registered in Sudan as new INGO implementing groups and authorized to open new operations in the Sudan on that basis."

CARE then joined the fray, disavowing any links between CARE USA and CARE Switzerland.  Mercy Corps made the same distinction vis-a-vis Mercy Corps Scotland.

(In other words - these aren't the droids you're looking for.)

So, to sum up.  CARE and Mercy Corps are returning.  Except that they're not.  Should be, ummmmm, smooth sailing from here.

All that said, I do have sympathy for Mr. Holmes, and for the good folks at CARE and Mercy Corps, who are now in a somewhat impossible position.

If nothing else, this episode - which itself is something of a tempest in a teapot - illustrates a broader truth about aid work in Darfur. Namely, that, as the Red Queen explained to Alice, "it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place."

As long as the Sudanese Government continues to obstruct humanitarian operations at each and every turn, then the fact that a handful of agencies are returning is, at best, a pyrrhic victory.