1. Home
  2. West Africa
  3. Chad

Aid workers withdraw from four refugee camps after disturbances

[Chad] Bredjing refugee camp in eastern Chad is already bursting at the seams with people who have fled the fighting in Darfur. September 2004.

Claire Soares/IRIN
There has been a meningitis outbreak in Chad's overcrowded refugee camps
Aid agencies have withdrawn their staff from four refugee camps in eastern Chad following disturbances which led to the injury of seven aid workers in one particular incident, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said on Wednesday. "UNHCR personnel and NGO staff withdrew from the camps of Iridimi, Touloum, Mile and Kounoungou on Tuesday 10 May," the UNHCR said in a statement released in Abeche, the main town in eastern Chad. These camps house some of the 193,000 refugees from Sudan's troubled Darfur region who have fled into eastern Chad since the Darfur conflict erupted over two years ago. "At Iridimi, a group of demonstrators armed with sticks and stones injured five UNHCR workers and two representatives of an NGO," the statement said. Three refugees had also been injured in the disturbances at the camp, 200 km northeast of Abeche, and had been taken to hospital, it added. UNHCR said the trouble began at Iridimi and Touloum on Monday, when the camp residents refused to take part in a refugee registration exercise being conducted there by UNHCR officials. In nearby Mile and Kounoungou, protests erupted when the camp residents refused to take part in a food distribution exercise which involved verifying the number of people actually present, the UNHCR said. The UNHCR began a census of the refugees living in its 12 camps in eastern Chad in March. This has so far reduced the official estimate of the number of Sudanese living there from 212,000 to 193,000. Violent demonstrations at the overcrowded refugee camps of Breidjing and Farchana in July last year led humanitarian workers based there to withdraw for a week. There was further trouble at Breidjing in October. Several of the refugee camps in the remote semi-desert of eastern Chad are plagued by overcrowding and all of them suffer from supply difficulties and water shortages.

This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

Share this article

Get the day’s top headlines in your inbox every morning

Starting at just $5 a month, you can become a member of The New Humanitarian and receive our premium newsletter, DAWNS Digest.

DAWNS Digest has been the trusted essential morning read for global aid and foreign policy professionals for more than 10 years.

Government, media, global governance organisations, NGOs, academics, and more subscribe to DAWNS to receive the day’s top global headlines of news and analysis in their inboxes every weekday morning.

It’s the perfect way to start your day.

Become a member of The New Humanitarian today and you’ll automatically be subscribed to DAWNS Digest – free of charge.

Become a member of The New Humanitarian

Support our journalism and become more involved in our community. Help us deliver informative, accessible, independent journalism that you can trust and provides accountability to the millions of people affected by crises worldwide.

Join