No chance of early return for Darfur refugees - UNHCR

An estimated 110,000 refugees in western Sudan's region of Darfur will not be going home any time soon, according to Ruud Lubbers, UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). It could be "months and months" before they could even begin to think of returning home, he said in Touloum, a UNHCR transit centre for the refugees. "There's no immediate prospect for them to go back now. UNHCR's role is to accommodate them in Chad until it is safe for them to go back to Darfur." Sebastien Apatita, the head of the UNHCR field office in the Chadian border town of Adre, said "up to now we cannot even talk about returns, we are still receiving people". Just 10 days ago, 10,000 refugees had arrived from Western Darfur, where their villages were attacked and burned by the Janjawid militias, he said. Less than a month ago, the Sudanese government announced that the war in Darfur was over and that authorities had been instructed to arrange for the return of refugees from Chad in cooperation with the UNHCR and the Chadian government. A meeting had then taken place between the governors of Western Darfur and the Ouaddai Region of eastern Chad to discuss the matter, but no formal contacts had been made with UNHCR, Apatita told IRIN. Despite frequent cross-border raids by the militias and miserable conditions, only about 9,000 of the Sudanese refugees on the Chadian border have been relocated further inland to safety. Yvan Sturm, the UNHCR senior emergency officer in the region, told IRIN that the pace of the relocations had been deliberately slow because UNHCR wanted to ensure that each of the refugees had access to a minimum of 15 litres of water per day. Within the next 10 to 15 days, the "bottleneck" should have been overcome, he said, as hydrologists working in the area found more water. As recently as Wednesday, UNHCR's partner, Norwegian Church Aid, had found a new water source in Touloum transit camp, to which up to now UNHCR had had to truck 60,000 litres of water a day. Within the next three weeks, UNHCR planned to have established three new camps in eastern Chad, in addition to the three existing ones - provided water was available - and to have moved 40,000 of the refugees within six weeks, Sturm told IRIN. Before the rainy season started in earnest in July, the UN agency hoped to have relocated up to 65,000 of the refugees to camps. Some of the semi-nomadic refugees have lived in the region for generations, freely crossing from one side of the border to the other, and do not want to be moved unless they are forced to for security reasons. Chad's desperately poor infrastructure means that the delivery of aid is extremely difficult and slow. UNHCR said on Thursday that the airport in Abeche lacked the facilities to support further airlifts of aid to the refugees, resulting in urgently needed plastic sheeting and blankets having to be trucked from the capital, N'djamena, about three days' drive away.