Primetime for Darfur, Ugandan death-toll dispute, the military steps on humanitarian toes in Afghanistan, and the more the merrier in disaster planning...

Reactions are starting (slowly) to trickle in on the less-than-decisive outcome to the Darfur peace talks in Abuja. At the time of writing, the Sudanese government and Darfur's biggest rebel faction had accepted an African Union and U.S.-brokered peace deal, but two other rebel groups had rejected it. What use an agreement if not all the warring parties sign on?

With the situation still as clear as mud, aid agencies are arguing that a signed piece of paper won't be much use to Darfur's 2 million displaced people unless there is concrete action to improve the situation in the field.

Oxfam regional director Paul Smith-Lomas said: "For those parties who have signed, the Abuja deal will only improve the protection of civilians if the written agreement is translated into real commitment on the ground. Previous ceasefires have been violated at will and have made little difference to the millions of people in Darfur who live with the daily threat of violence."

AlertNet has heard that, while the parties to the conflict have been participating in peace talks, they have continued to mount offensives and loot property to consolidate their positions on the ground. There have been reports of government-backed attacks in south Darfur, fighting between rebel factions in north Darfur, and ongoing clashes in Jebel Marra and west Darfur.

In some areas, the deteriorating security situation has forced aid agencies to withdraw non-local staff. Oxfam, for example, has temporarily pulled out of programmes in camps around the town of Shangil Tobai in north Darfur. It says vehicles have been hijacked and stolen, and aid workers are unable to carry out their activities in safety.

Given the huge problems facing the humanitarian community in Darfur, relief agencies are unlikely to view the latest developments in the peace process with a huge amount of optimism.

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With peace talks in Darfur at a critical juncture, Britain's Guardian newspaper reports on how the crisis has received its best exposure so far on U.S. television - but not on the main evening news broadcasts.

Instead it was left to the hospital drama "ER" to throw its "heart-throb" doctor into the midst of the tragedy. That followed on from chat-show appearances by Hollywood star George Clooney (also a former "ER" man) in the wake of his recent visit to Sudan's troubled western region.

Eric Reeves, a Sudanese scholar, told the Guardian he thought the drama's producers had managed to convey a sense of "the viciousness" of the government-backed Janjaweed militias. "It was prime-time television, and you can't do Darfur [on prime-time television]. But you can give a suggestion. It gave a good-faith suggestion," he told the paper.

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Death tolls are often a touchy subject for governments, and a mortality survey in northern Uganda is still raising hackles almost a year after it was finished.

A report in the Ugandan newspaper The New Vision launched a tirade against a survey of deaths in squalid camps for displaced people in northern Uganda (where a cult-like rebel group has been preying on local people for almost 20 years) which estimated that 26,000 people had died between January and July 2005.

Researchers, under the auspices of International Rescue Committee, the U.N. World Health Organisation (WHO), and the Ugandan Ministry of Health, came up with a death toll of 1,000 a week from violence and lack of disease, in a region where healthcare is scarce and HIV rates are well above the national average.

The New Vision called the death toll a myth, and rattled off a series of criticisms of the survey's methodology, including the accusation that people who can't read wouldn't be able to keep track of time. "The respondents had to recall how many household members died in the last six months. That is difficult for people are illiterate and traumatised," it said.

Francesco Checchi, who coordinated the survey, fought back in an editorial in the same paper. It's a long list of rebuttals, including an explanation that most displaced people don't die in hospitals, where they would appear on medical records, but are much more likely to die at home, which is why household surveys paint a more accurate picture.

I'm sure we haven't heard the end of this debate.

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Aid agencies are using this week's handover of command of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force to Britain as an opportunity to warn against what they see as growing involvement of the military in humanitarian operations. CARE International is calling on the British military to refocus efforts on providing security and beefing up the capacity of the Afghan national forces "leaving humanitarian and development work aside".

While debate about the blurring of the lines between military operations and relief and reconstruction work is nothing new, some aid agencies feel that in Afghanistan the possibility of being perceived as partners in the state-building agenda of the U.S.-led coalition is particularly high. CARE argues that the involvement of the military in humanitarian and development activities has put aid agencies and the local communities they work with at risk.

Talking to Howard Mollett, CARE International UK's Humanitarian Aid Advisor, a couple of interesting examples of military-NGO friction emerge. In the south, CARE's local partners were approached by the Taliban and told that as long as they continued to operate in the same way, they would not be targeted. But if they accepted funding from the military-led "provincial reconstruction team" (PRT), their security might be threatened.

Problems are not limited to security, with aid agencies saying military projects can undermine their own. In Afghanistan's Badghis province, one of CARE's local partners had started up a micro-loan business with interest rates of around 10 percent, as part of a long-term community project. The PRT came in and set up a short-term loans project with no fee, which brought people flocking to what CARE sees as a less sustainable option.

CARE says it also concerned about the potential for government aid funds to be diverted to military-backed projects. "Aid money should be channelled through civilian organisations and military 'hearts and minds' money should come from defence budgets," said Mollett.

The Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas Development Institute recently published a report highlighting how growing support for military involvement in assistance and protection is challenging the operational capacities and security approaches of the humanitarian system.

It said that greater strategic engagement was needed between aid groups and the military to clarify and reinforce the principles of humanitarian action and to improve both sides' understanding of each other's expertise. Aid agencies in Afghanistan will be hoping a few copies filter through to sympathetic army commanders fast.

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Remember the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker? What about the butcher, the teacher, the forestry ranger? Disaster experts at a Harvard University conference last week came up with a model for getting people from different walks of life to plan for disasters that are a real risk.

So, they say, if you got a poultry farmer, a social worker, a butcher, a school teacher and a forest ranger together to talk about bird flu, they could come up with some products that would be useful to hundreds of similar communities. For example, they could write a press release, a list of recommendations, a public information document.

inTERRAgate, a British disaster experts' website, has the full commentary from Ilan Kelman of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and Marla Petal of Risk RED on disasters website.

They also said some of the U.S. participants in the conference focused too much on Hurricane Katrina, and didn't seem to know much about American history. "While Katrina stands out due to the number of displaced people combined with the distance and duration of their displacement, epidemic-related national disruption has arguably been far greater than Katrina, depending on the metrics used and considering proportional impact."

In fact, Kelman and Petal say, Katrina is no higher than fifth on the list of most fatal hurricanes to hit the United States. The 1906 San Francisco earthquake killed twice as many people and epidemics have had even higher death tolls.

Megan Rowling and Ruth Gidley
AlertNet journalists