Refugee influx puts strain on local population

For the past year, the poor rural population of eastern Chad has been voluntarily providing food and hospitality to a growing influx of refugees from Sudan's troubled Darfur region. But this has put a severe strain on their own meagre resources and could eventually leave them as destitute as their Sudanese guests. "It is war which brought the Sudanese here, and it is our duty to help them," said Isaac Suliman, a 40-year-old farmer from Amadina, a village near the Konoungo refugee camp. "They often stop by and ask for food. We give them what we have," he told IRIN on his way back from the local market. But grain prices have rocketed, and the trees that dot the flat semi-desert of eastern Chad have had their branches lopped off for firewood and poles to make crude shelters. In many places, the carcases of cattle and donkeys show that over-grazing has stripped the land of its meagre pasture, and that uncontrolled disease is taking its toll on livestock. Chadian government officials are already starting to ring the alarm bells. "Refugees are slowly being moved to refugee camps. But the local population, for its part, is only left with starvation. We fear what will happen when the rains come, since food items will become scarce and famine could follow," Moussa Abderamane Yodi, the government administrator of Chadian Tine, told IRIN. A dry river bed or wadi separates Chadian Tine from its Sudanese counterpart, which was once occupied by the Darfur rebels, but was recaptured by Sudanese government forces at the end of January. Before the Darfur rebellion erupted in February last year, Chadian Tine had a population of between 8,000 and 10,000. This, however, has been swollen by the influx of Sudanese refugees, bringing further pressure to bear on the meagre resources of the town and its surrounding countryside. "Tine has seen its population double or even triple over the last months, reaching 30,000 people at given periods," Yodi told IRIN. "If the refugees stay here longer, a major ecological catastrophe could arise," he added. Relief workers complain that inadequate sanitation facilities are forcing Tine's swollen population to defecate anywhere they can. The aid workers worry that this will cause health problems, particularly once the rains come in June, and wash the human excrement into wells and pools used for drinking water. On the outskirts of Tine, thousands of destitute women, children and old people huddle under makeshift shelters waiting for trucks from the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to pick them up and transport them to official refugee camps well away from the troubled frontier. Food prices in Tine market have gone through the roof as a result of this influx of hungry people. One local woman, who identified herself only as Aïcha, complained that a bag of millet, which cost 10,000 CFA ($18) a year ago, had more than doubled in price to 25,000 CFA ($45). The town's inhabitants have been the indirect beneficiaries of an emergency health post set up by Medecins Sans Frontieres-Belgium (MSF-B) to treat Sudanese refugees. It now also treats local people free of charge and is able to perform minor surgery, which is beyond the capability of Tine's government-run health centre. However, the arrival of MSF-B has also had the undesired effect of putting this poorly resourced government-run clinic virtually out of business. Paul Annys, MSF-B’s coordinator in Tine, acknowledged the problem, but said: "There was no choice but set our own operation if we were to save lives. What we did to remedy the situation was to collaborate with the Chadian Ministry of Health so that they can carry out activities when we phase out." Yodi would like the relief agencies flooding into eastern Chad to help the refugees, to devote some of their time and money to helping the local Chadian population, which, he says, did so much to help the refugees before assistance began arriving from abroad. "Compensatory projects should be implemented for the local population," he told IRIN, warning that water supplies in Tine were running short, while the big trucks of the aid agencies were churning up the district's fragile dirt roads. The hospitality shown by the population of eastern Chad to the officially estimated 120,000 Sudanese refugees who have already crossed the border, is easily explained. The refugees are mostly members of the Zaghawah, Fur and Masalit ethnic groups, which straddle the border and have traditionally moved freely across it. Before the war in Darfur broke out, it was not unusual for men in Tine to have two wives, one on the Sudanese side of the town and the other on the Chadian. Indeed, relief workers say that many of the Sudanese refugees crossing into Chad today are actually Chadians who fled to Sudan during a succession of civil wars in Chad in the 1970s and 1980s, and their descendents. Most of the refugees are old men and women with children. The younger men have mostly stayed behind to look after whatever possessions the family might have left, or to fight on the side of the two rebel movements battling the Sudanese armed forces and the Janjawid militia. Many of them also perished at the hands of the Janjawid, who, according to the refugees, make a special point of hunting down and killing young men of fighting age. The Janjawid are Arabic-speaking nomads. Diplomats and relief workers say they have been armed by Khartoum to help Sudan's regular armed forces fight the rebels. But the Sudanese government denies arming the Janjawid to terrorise the local people. President Umar al-Bashir, on a visit to Nyala in Southern Darfur State this week, warned fighters in the region, saying those who carried arms to undermine Sudan's peace and stability would be regarded as "outlaws", Sudan Radio reported on Thursday. The Janjawid ride across the arid landscape mounted on horses and camels, looting and burning villages, chasing out their inhabitants and seizing their livestock. Chadian officials also accuse them of frequently raiding across the border into Chad. "The Janjawid are violating the Chadian territory, taking refugees and Chadian cattle, killing the herdsmen. Sometimes, they burn villages. They come in groups of 200 to 300," said Lt-Col Hamat Bong Aware, the military commander of the Ouaddai and Biltine regions; Tine is in Biltine. "There are confrontations between these militias and local herdsmen all the time. The herdsmen resist and there are numerous deaths and injuries," he added. In Tine itself, three people died and 15 were injured on 29 January when a Sudanese air force plane attacking rebel positions in the Sudanese side of the town dropped stray bombs on the Chadian side of the border. And local people complain that several Janjawid cross-border incursions in the district have taken place since then. The refugees arriving from Darfur are in a pitiful condition. Many have been stripped of all their possessions and have walked for several days in order to reach the border. "I left Karnoi [about 220 km northeast of Al-Junaynah, the capital of Western Darfur State] with my family after the Janjawid attacked and burnt the village," said Hasan Sulayman, a 43-year-old farmer from Darfur, who had finally made it to the Kounoungo refugee camp, deliberately built well away from the frontier, about 70 km southwest of Tine. "On the way to Chad, our cattle was stolen, leaving us with nothing," Sulayman added as he and dozens of other refugees who had spontaneously trekked to the UNHCR-run camp waited to be formally registered. "We had to beg to survive, but the people in Chad helped us a lot," he said. At Sulayman's side, his two wives sat chatting quietly on a mat in the shade of a tree. They were surrounded by children in ragged clothes trying to attract the attention of passers-by. All the family's meagre possessions hung in plastic bags from the tree's branches, remnants of a forgotten conflict.