The United Nations refugee agency accused Sudan on Thursday of breaking its promises in Darfur, as more refugees fled to neighbouring Chad from a fresh wave of attacks on civilians.
Hundreds have crossed the border in recent weeks after assaults on 11 villages which fitted the pattern of the government-sponsored campaign of ethnic cleansing in the westerrn region.
The UN fears that a further 100 000 refugees may head for Chad in the coming months and has drawn up contingency plans to build a further seven camps near the border.
There are already nine vast camps along the border, holding an estimated 190 000 people, and a tenth is being built.
Lino Bordin, deputy representative of the UN high commissioner for refugees in Chad, said the villages had been attacked in waves, beginning with an aerial bombardment.
”The refugees said that 11 villages were attacked from the 2nd to the 10th of August. They were attacked by plane, and after that by cars full of soldiers, and after that by the Janjaweed [militia],” he said.
”These are broken promises by Sudan. They promised that they would start to solve this situation, but that has not happened yet.
”The refugees have arrived in the camps suffering from malnutrition and dehydration, and without any of their possessions. They came with nothing. When the Janjaweed arrived, they stole everything from the houses.”
The latest refugees have trickled across the border in small bands rather than in the vast movement of people seen earlier this year.
The UN predicts that there will continue to be a refugee crisis on the Chad border for at least another year and is stepping up its plans to feed people in the camps as heavy rains continue to block vital roads.
The UN world food programme is planning to start airdropping food in the coming weeks, and the warming of relations between Libya and the west has enabled the opening of an overland supply route through the Libyan desert.
Robert Gillenwater, the programme’s head of logistics in Chad, has worked in the Cambodian jungles, where he used elephants to get supplies through, and in the Himalayas, where porters had to carry food sacks over mountains.
But he described feeding Darfur’s refugees as ”one of the biggest challenges in the 10 years I’ve been in the WFP”.
At the WFP’s Chadian headquarters in the capital N’Djamena he said: ”You couldn’t ask for more cooperation from the Chadian government.
”They have been very, very supportive.
”The donor countries have been coming through — donors have been pledging and giving. Those two elements are in place, but mother nature is not cooperating.”
The UN has been bringing food shipments overland from the Atlantic coast to N’Djamena, and then down a 900km road to Abeché, the eastern town which has become a hub for the relief operation.
The road to the east was once properly surfaced but has been allowed to crumble into of broken tarmac and soil.
In the wet season it has to be closed, because truck wheels grinding through the mud would destroy what is left of the road.
Then the UN convoys have to take an 1 392km detour through the desert to reach Abeché.
Many of the routes from there to the border are criss-crossed by wadis — dry riverbeds which fill with floodwater during the rains.
A truck caught crossing a wadi when it floods is in danger of being swept away. Three UN vehicles have already been lost in this fashion.
To spare the trucks, the UN has been employing porters to carry the bags of food across the wadis from one vehicles to another.
The huge international effort to support the refugees has caused tension with the local people in the border region of Chad. The villagers who shared their food with the refugees when they first arrived are now having to struggle to feed themselves adequately in the traditionally lean period between planting in May and the harvest in November.
The Chadian government says the influx of civilians fleeing violence in Darfur has placed an enormous burden on its country, one of the poorest in the world.
It is afraid that a further big influx of refugees could destabilise the already fragile Chadian economy. – Guardian Unlimited Â