By Cynthia Johnston
KHARTOUM, May 21 (Reuters) - A British humanitarian group has returned to Darfur's largest displaced persons camp after being forced out in December following a coordinated attack on relief groups in which an international aid worker was raped.
The December attack on relief workers in rebel-controlled Gereida was the biggest single assault on the Darfur aid operation, the world's largest, since it began operations in Sudan's war-ravaged west in early 2004.
The attack, in which a staff member of French aid agency Action contre la Faim was raped, led to the immediate evacuation of 71 aid workers and restricted humanitarian aid reaching the region's largest population of war victims.
Only the International Committee of the Red Cross kept its international staff on site.
But medical aid group Merlin said on Monday it had re-opened a primary health care clinic in the camp last week, and was flying in international staff including doctors and nurses for day trips once a week by helicopter to assist local staff.
Internationals were not spending the night in Gereida.
"It really was a horrific attack against the humanitarian community," Linda Edwards, Merlin's country director for Sudan, told Reuters in an interview. "I am still trying to minimise risk. So therefore at this stage we are not prepared to put a full team on the ground the way we worked previously."
The Merlin clinic saw 350 patients on day one, and vaccinated dozens of children against tuberculosis, polio and hepatitis B. The number of daily patients has now risen to 530.
Gereida houses 130,000 people who have fled attacks on villages in Darfur, where the United Nations says 200,000 people have been killed and over 2 million displaced since ethnic and political conflict flared in 2003.
It was not clear who attacked the aid agencies. Sources in the aid community have said they suspected a breakaway faction from rebel leader Minni Arcua Minnawi, who signed a 2006 peace deal with Khartoum but has since lost some sway on the ground.
MORE AID GROUPS TO RETURN?
Aid community sources said while other relief groups were assessing a return to Gereida in the coming months, only ICRC and Merlin had internationals on the ground.
A spokesman for British aid group Oxfam, which had five vehicles stolen and whose compound was fired on during the attack, said his group had no immediate plans to return. Oxfam had provided water to the camp, and maintains a skeleton staff of locals working on hygiene issues.
"Our position has always been that we are open to returning," spokesman Alun McDonald said. But there was not enough improvement in operating conditions to go back just yet.
Edwards said Merlin was currently flying in about 5 staff per week in a World Food Programme helicopter. Staff, including roughly 30 locals based in Gereida, were "as safe as they can be in the context of Darfur".
"We'll be looking gradually ... to see if we can push for another flight, which was the case previously. There were two flights every week. And to see if we can stay overnight, which means that we can increase our services," she said.
She said safety precautions had been increased, and a larger number of guards were on site, although they remained unarmed and carried whistles.
Merlin was planning to ultimately take over another health clinic in Gereida currently operated by the ICRC, which had boosted its operations there after other aid groups pulled out but now wants to focus on more rural areas.
More immediately, Merlin hoped to open a 36-hour recovery ward where staff could monitor patients and where women could recover after childbirth, in addition to two mobile health clinics on the outskirts of the camp.
