"Getting into a helicopter knowing you are leaving tens of thousands of people behind with no healthcare is heartbreaking. It was probably the hardest thing I have ever had to do," said Vanessa Cramond, a nurse who worked in the hospital in Muhajariya for nine months. Muhajariya is a large town in south Darfur where MSF ran a hospital and provided care to around 70,000 people from the town and surrounding areas.

In February 2008, following a meningitis outbreak in Niertiti, MSF launched a mass vaccination campaign and vaccinated over 28,000 people. Currently, there are meningitis outbreaks in Niertiti and Kalma camp -- where an estimated 130,000 people are in urgent need of vaccination. However, because of the expulsion of aid organizations, their needs are probably completely unanswered.[Photo: Stephan Oberreit/MSF]

"In January we had to evacuate a lot of the staff for six weeks because of insecurity in the area and had only been back in Muharajiya for two weeks when the expulsion took place. When we left, we were seeing between 100 and 150 outpatients a day and increasing numbers of malnourished children – we saw 21 new admissions of children with severe acute malnutrition in one week when we normally admitted 3 to 4 new cases in one month. These people we were assisting have now been left with nobody to treat even the most basic of their medical needs."

"In spite of all the problems, the situation wasn't catastrophic," said Emanuela Bertoli, MSF's medical coordinator. "In the hospitals and clinics where we worked – either alone or in cooperation with Sudan Ministry of Health teams – the mortality rate was below 4 percent, which is better than that in many hospitals in other African countries. We managed to maintain a good level of medical care for a population exposed to many forms of violence and epidemics. And beyond medical care and MSF, the entire humanitarian operation in Darfur – the largest in the world – made it possible to avoid excess mortality overall. So of course we are all very worried now."

Eric Jeunot left Zalingei on March 3, saying "the Sudanese authorities asked international staff to evacuate Zalingei, as well as several other towns, saying that they could no longer guarantee our safety. Neither I nor any of the 11 other members of my team who had to leave were worried. We had notified the local authorities that we wanted to stay to make sure that essential medical staff remained."

When Jeunot learned that the evacuation had become an expulsion, he said, "I couldn't speak directly with the 120 people who worked with us – some for as many as five years – and lay them off, and I couldn't tell the director of the hospital that relied on Médecins Sans Frontières that we had to stop working immediately. I feel like I abandoned people to whom I had made a commitment."

According to a MSF report, four MSF staff kidnapped on March 11 from Serif Umra, North Darfur, were released safely in the early morning of March 14.

The MSF website said that as a result of the abduction, almost all MSF international staff were evacuated from its Darfur projects, while a number of Sudanese staff were relocated to safer areas. A skeleton MSF team remained behind to secure the release of the kidnapped staff.

Hassabu Mohammed Abdel-Rahman, Sudanese commissioner for Humanitarian Aid, made an announcement at a press conference on March 15 that the Sudanese government had taken additional security measures to protect foreign nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and their offices in the restive western Sudanese region of Darfur.

Xinhua news agency Tuesday reported that Osman Mohammed Yousef Kibir, the governor of North Darfur State, had downplayed the role of the deported organizations in humanitarian work, saying the expulsion had not caused any negative effect on the situation in Darfur.

He said 95 percent of the staff of these organizations were residents of Darfur and a large proportion of the technical and health cadres working with these organizations had been seconded from the North Darfur Ministry of Health.

"There is no problem in the area of health; medication is available and the personnel that have been doing this work are Sudanese cadres and they are still in place," he said.