Up to 18 000 refugees were trying to find shelter in the desert just inside the border with Chad on Thursday after Sudanese government aircraft bombed several targets in a fierce flare-up of an unexpected new war in Sudan’s vast western province of Darfur.
UN officials and other aid workers have warned of a huge humanitarian emergency with as many as 600 000 people made homeless by fighting inside the territory. Unlike the refugees who escaped into Chad, they remain out of reach of international help.
Refugees and aid workers report frequent bombing raids by Sudanese government planes round the town of Tine which straddles the border, as well as mass killings and hut burnings by armed pro-government horsemen in other parts of Darfur.
Gutbi al-Mahdi, the political adviser to Sudan’s president, Omar al-Bashir, confirmed that government planes had bombed four targets this week but insisted they were camps run by rebels fighting for autonomy for the region.
The rebels had suffered ”a lot of losses”, he told the Associated Press.
The village of Habila was deserted, according to the UN refugee agency, after its entire population of 1 750 fled an air attack 10 days ago. An aircraft and helicopters had bombed it, they said, before armed men on horses and camels arrived and stole cattle.
The UNHCR has been racing to erect tented camps several miles inside Chad and urging refugees to move there. The armed raiders have often crossed short distances into Chad along the 640km border to continue harassing people who have only bushes as shelter against the wind and sand.
The sudden surge in fighting has come as Sudanese officials and negotiators from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army are close to final agreement on a power-sharing deal to end a 20-year civil war between the north and the south.
They have agreed to share the country’s oil wealth and to hold a referendum on the south’s possible secession in six years’ time. Their talks adjourned this week until February 17 because of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.
The war in Darfur will not affect that deal, but it appears to have been sparked by it.
Leaders of the two armed movements fighting for Darfur’s autonomy, the Sudan Liberation Army and a smaller group called the Justice and Equality Movement, hope to exploit the government’s willingness to make concessions in the south to get similar benefits for the marginalised western province. The Khartoum area and the nearby Nile regions have always been excessively favoured, they claim.
Clashes
Although clashes between nomads and settled pastoralists have gone on in Darfur for years, they were usually settled by tribal reconciliation conferences. Tensions became overtly political after the autonomists took up arms last February and captured Tine.
Up to 95 000 people fled into Chad over the next several months as the government and armed militias sought to quell the widening rebellion.
Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, said last month he was ”alarmed at the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian situation and reports of widespread abuses against civilians, including killings, rape, and the burning and looting of entire villages”.
Researchers from Amnesty International, who interviewed refugees late last year, said: ”The government has indiscriminately bombed towns and villages, suspected of harbouring or sympathising with members of the armed opposition, unlawfully killing many non-combatants.”
Details of these killings are due to be published next week in an Amnesty report.
The conflict is different from the main north-south war between the largely Arab government and the Nuer, Dinka, and other black African ethnic groups. Most people in Darfur are Sunni Muslims and some call themselves ”black Arabs”.
Desperation
But Amnesty reports that ”the conflict is rapidly taking on a racial note”. The organisation criticises the government for restricting free speech and assembly, which prevents civilians raising their grievances and leads to desperation and violence.
Médecins sans Frontières, the international medical charity which has been working with refugees in Chad and has a small team in Nyala in Darfur, says the Sudanese authorities have forcibly relocated around 10 000 people in camps around the town.
A spokesperson for the organisation said: ”Many of the people fled in panic when the process began on Wednesday. On Thursday the camps were closed by the authorities.
”The new camps are unsafe and ill-equipped and MSF believes the move is harmful for a population already suffering from hunger, trauma and destitution.
”Mortality rates among these people in the camps are already at the level of an emergency.”
The Chad government brokered a ceasefire last year, but it broke down in December. Efforts are under way to renew it. Britain and other western governments are offering to send international monitors to observe it. – Guardian Unlimited Â