From Sudan

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United Nations investigators have found most of the small arms fuelling the conflict in Sudan’s western Darfur are Chinese, despite an arms ban on a region where tens of thousands have been killed and 2.5 million squat in squalid camps.

“China has been, and continues to be, a major supplier of light weapons to the government of Sudan and many of the neighbouring states,” said Ernst Jan Hogendoorn, one of four U.N. experts on an panel which recommended 17 players in the Darfur conflict be sanctioned for obstructing peace.

And from the BBC:

Aid worker Matthew Langol has twice been airlifted out of southern Sudan, where he was delivering medicines to villages ravaged by cholera, after rebels ambushed aid convoys travelling behind him, blocking his way out.

“It’s very dangerous work,” he admits.

“No-one likes making the journey. But the disease comes in waves here, and no medicine would mean higher fatalities and a chain reaction of transmissions.”

The attacks are staged by the feared Lord’s Resistance Army, which has moved to Sudan from northern Uganda.

At least five aid workers travelling along this road have been ambushed and killed by the rebels since October 2005, with others suffering serious injuries.

Southern Sudan – one of the poorest parts of the world after a 21-year civil war that ended 18 months ago – has suffered over 500 cholera deaths since January.

Another 13,800 people have been affected by the disease in the region.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has warned the epidemic could spread to Sudan’s neighbours, and on Wednesday the agency confirmed reports it has spread to Darfur, where 2.5m refugees live in squalid conditions and close proximity. […]

Dr Claire-Lise Chaignat of the WHO’s Global Task Force on Cholera Control in Geneva says Khartoum is so wary of the effects cholera could have on exports that it has renamed the disease altogether.

“Officially Sudan does not speak about cholera, they speak about Acute Watery Diarrhoea. But it’s cholera,” she says.

“It has a stigma, and it’s generating a lot of panic. Some countries place sanctions on the import of foods and other products from countries that declare cholera, and while the Sudanese government isn’t pretending cholera doesn’t exist, there’s an understanding not to refer to it as such.”