Displacement crisis looming in south east

Hunger and militia attacks in the remote border areas of eastern Chad have driven more than 11,000 Chadians to seek international assistance and stretched resources meant for Sudanese refugees, according to aid agencies. According to the UN an estimated 50,000 Chadians are displaced in eastern Chad, but until a recent wave of attacks on the government of President Idriss Deby by rebel forces nearly all the internally displaced people (IDP) had managed on assistance from friends and family. Since fighting surged two weeks ago the Chadian population has tripled at an informal settlement close to a camp at Goz Beida, 150 km from the Sudan border, according to Matthew Conway, spokesman for the UN refugee agency UNHCR. “Conditions are not ideal. Water capacity is especially difficult as demand has exceeded supply so we’re having trouble pumping enough to meet everyone’s needs. There’s an urgent need to get these people located elsewhere,” said Conway. Facilities at Goz Beida camp are meant for refugees who crossed the border from Sudan to escape violence in Sudan’s troubled Darfur region. The displaced are sharing water and sanitation with the 14,000 Sudanese refugees. They are camped on land earmarked for cultivation by the refugees when the mid-year rainy season arrives, perhaps as early as next month. Chad’s eastern provinces have seen some of the worst violence since militia groups started criss-crossing the border to attack the Chadian army and plunder villages in late 2005. “Since late 2005 there has been a surge of attacks across the border and this has caused some of the displacement,” said Karim Khalil of the NGO Care International by telephone from Abeche, a major town in eastern Chad. As rebel fighters swept through the east bound for the capital N’djamena, aid agencies reported truck-loads of Chadians arriving at refugee camps reporting attacks on their towns by armed militia groups. According to the humanitarian agency International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) the lack of aid deliveries to remote towns in insecure areas along the border, and a growing awareness of aid agencies activities around the four main refugee camps in Chad, are also motivating people to move. “People have been moving more or less steadily from the border area over to more central areas for several weeks now, and they are moving because they believe they will get assistance there,” said the head of the ICRC delegation Thomas Merkelbach. According to Merkelbach a recent ICRC mission to the border found that people are leaving because they have heard aid is available elsewhere and not because they are fleeing violence. “They have never moved because of the attacks. People say they are leaving to get assistance,” added Merkelbach. The World Food Programme (WFP) leads feeding programmes throughout eastern Chad for some quarter of a million refugees from Sudan and Central African Republic. But WFP spokesman Marcus Prior warned that that number could rise as local resources dwindle and Chadians turn to food aid, too. “Despite serious fighting in the region between the Chadian army and militias since late 2005, most people are still able to live with their families, and there is still food around from the harvest, but that situation will deteriorate as we move into the hunger season when food supplies normally run out. We are very concerned about these people,” Prior said. The American NGO Refugees International warned in a report issued in early April, before the latest round of fighting, that many Chadians forced out of their villages by rebels and militia groups remained out of sight close to the Sudanese border, living off already impoverished relatives and neighbours, and that UN agencies “have not been prepared to intervene in the growing IDP situation.”