Clouds of sand billow around flimsy shelters that dot the parched and desolate plains. As the wind picks up, women lift the folds of their brilliant pink, blue and green veils to shield their faces from the enveloping dust.
Nearly 200 000 terrified villagers have sought sanctuary in one of the most inhospitable areas on Earth, the deserts of Chad, near the border of Sudan. They are some of the more than one million people chased from their homes in the past 16 months in what humanitarian workers call a systematic campaign of terror in Sudan’s Darfur region.
Over and over, they tell the same story. First airplanes and helicopters came and bombed their villages. Then gun- and sword-wielding militiamen came galloping in on horse and camelback — burning, looting, raping and killing.
”They killed my husband. They killed my children. They burned my house. They stole my cattle,” Aza Jumah Tedel wept into her veil.
Tedel fled into the desert with her two surviving children, trekking 12 days on a donkey to reach the Chad border. There she waited for a month until the United Nations refugee agency took her by truck to Camp Iridimi, about 70km west of the border.
”There was no food, no water,” said Dabaiye Omar Saleh, another camp resident whose husband was shot before her eyes in a militia raid. ”If we found a puddle by the side of the road, we scooped it up with our hands.”
Tens of thousands have made the same journey, forced on a desperate flight through the desert by Arab herders bent on chasing their African farming neighbours from the vast western region, the size of Iraq. Not everyone survives the journey.
”The 15 000 people who are here have lost everything,” UN Undersecretary for Humanitarian Affairs Jan Egeland said as he toured Iridimi with UN Secretary General Kofi Annan this week. ”They were bombed, they were hunted down by the most hideous campaign of terror.”
UN and aid workers have battled to keep up with the flood of refugees that streamed across the 600km border between Darfur and Chad at the height of the crisis in the first months of the year. Despite an April ceasefire between the government and two rebel groups, militia raids on civilians continue, sending more people fleeing for their lives, UN officials say.
Human rights groups accuse the government of backing the militias. The government denies any complicity in the militia attacks and says the warring sides are clashing over land and scarce water resources.
Without international assistance, Chadian villagers were the first to help, sharing the little water, food and fodder they had with the refugees. But as the months dragged on, the food and water started to run out and local villagers could no longer cope.
Both refugees and their Chadian hosts — who come from the same African tribes — are also subject to continuous cross-border raids by the Sudanese militias known as the Janjaweed. The New York-based Human Rights Watch has documented at least seven incursions into Chad since early June.
”The Janjaweed cross to take our cattle and our women,” said Saleh Hamid Moubarak, an ageing man in a white turban sitting on a matt with a group of camp elders.
Three of his children were killed in the Darfur bombings, and he lost his three wives in the panic during the attack.
”Whether they are alive or dead, I don’t know,” he said, lifting his hands helplessly.
In January, the UN refugee agency started relocating refugees to camps away from the insecure border area. So far, close to 120 000 have arrived in nine camps. But the process is hampered by the vast distances and the start of the rainy season, which will make many roads impassible.
Finding sites with enough water for the refugees is another major challenge in arid, landlocked Chad. Iridimi was only intended to accommodate 8 000 people, but when word got out, thousands more arrived on foot from the border. As a result, they must survive on less than half the UN standard of 15 liters of water a day.
To make matters worse, UN agencies have only received about a third of the $349,5-million they need to respond to the crisis on both sides of the border. At the current rate of funding, about a quarter of the internally displaced in Sudan won’t receive any health care and many malnourished children will go untreated.
As the rains arrive, humanitarian agencies fear outbreaks of hunger and disease, especially in the most distant and vulnerable parts of Darfur.
Despite these setbacks, Egeland says the UN and aid groups are scaling up their efforts in a bid to distribute a month’s food to one million people by the end of July, build thousands of latrines and ward against outbreaks of cholera, malaria and dysentery.
”But we are putting plasters on the wound here,” Egeland said, ”What we need is a robust peace-making programme.” — Sapa-AP