Refugee camps overcrowded as influx from Darfur escalates

More than 100 Sudanese refugee women clad in brightly coloured flowing dresses queue patiently to draw water from the yellow plastic blister by a borehole at Kounoungo refugee camp in eastern Chad. But each of the 9,000 refugees in this city of brown tents and makeshift shelters of wooden boughs is only allowed seven litres per day - half the normal ration. Kounoungo, like the six other camps for refugees from Sudan's troubled western region of Darfur, is less than six months old, but already it is overcrowded, and more refugees keep on crossing the border. "I am happy to be safe here, but water and food are scarce. We therefore have to beg in the village," said Muhammad Alawi, who arrived at Konoungo with his family 10 days earlier, but, like hundreds of other refugees, was still waiting for registration. WATER SUPPLIES A MAJOR ISSUE The scarcity of water is a major issue in the flat semi-desert of eastern Chad, whose sandy wastes are dotted with dry bushes and acacia trees. In fact, availability of water is one of the main factors deciding the location of the refugee camps built so far and a further three that are still planned. "There are problems with water," said Natien Sioueye, the water manager at Kounoungo camp. "The Sphere standard ration is 15 litres per person per day, but we can only provide seven." Sphere is a set of minimum standards of human welfare which major relief agencies seek to achieve when conducting relief operations. IMPENDING RAINS THREATEN FOOD AVAILABILITY Relief workers are also worried that they do not have enough food in place to feed a refugee population now twice as high as they had expected a few months ago when contingency plans were drawn up and appeals were made to donors. They warn that the situation could reach crisis proportions once the five-month rainy season starts in June, turning the dirt roads of eastern Chad into quagmires of mud virtually impossible for heavily laden trucks to negotiate. "During the rainy season, delivery takes two or three weeks instead of two or three days, and items risk coming late," said Jean Charles Dei, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) head of operations in Abeche, the main town in eastern Chad. "We are fighting to position our stocks and cover refugees before the rainy season," he added. WFP appealed earlier this year for US $19.4 million to feed an expected 100,000 refugees from Darfur. But nearly double that number have arrived in Chad already, and more keep flooding across the border, fleeing the Janjawid Arab militias, who systematically kill their menfolk and burn and pillage their villages. However, to date WFP has only received $12.7 million for the Darfur refugees. OVERCROWDING IN REFUGEE CAMPS SET TO WORSEN Alphonse Malanda, the head of the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Chad, told IRIN that as of 21 May, 74,446 registered refugees had been admitted to the seven official camps in eastern Chad. However, about 105,000 others were waiting in makeshift shelters along the 600-km border with Sudan for the UNHCR's white-painted trucks to come and pick them up, he added. Other NGOs are now working with similarly increasing numbers. The Washington-based Refugees International (RI) recently estimated that there were already 200,000 Sudanese refugees in Chad, while the Catholic relief agency Caritas uses a working figure of 180,000. Although UNHCR is already planning the construction of three more refugee camps, Malanda warned that more might be needed. "If the influx continues during or after the rainy season, we will have to increase the number of camps," he told IRIN. Relief workers are now talking seriously about the need for an expensive 900-km airlift from the Chadian capital, N'djamena, to keep the camps adequately supplied during the five-month rainy season which is about to start. RI has suggested that French military transport planes and helicopters based in N'djamena could be used for this purpose. One WFP official said his organisation was also examining the feasibility of trucking food across the Sahara desert from Libya. The distance from the Libyan Mediterranean port of Benghazi to Abeche is nearly 3,000 km, but only half that distance is served by proper roads. The second half of the journey would have to be made along poorly marked desert tracks. MALNUTRITION INCREASING Meanwhile, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has launched a campaign asserting that malnutrition rates are often worse inside the refugee camps than outside them. "The problem in the camps is that food is only distributed to people that have been registered," Michel Francoys, the head of MSF-Belgium in Chad, told IRIN. "Strangely enough, malnutrition is higher in the camps than among those who have stayed along the border," he added. "In Konoungo, for instance, there are more and more malnutrition cases. In Iridimi and Toloum, there are more and more diarrhoea cases, which, when combined with moderate malnutrition, cause severe malnutrition. In the Iriba therapeutic feeding centre, we are treating 70 children under five. It is serious," he stressed. Asked to elucidate, Dei said MSF's comments only applied to new arrivals in the camps and were not based on a properly conducted survey. "MSF has not undertaken a proper investigation, it has only conducted superficial screening," he told IRIN. Kounoungo, with its neat rows of tents, each sheltering family groups of seven or eight people, was originally built to house 6,000 refugees, but UNHCR said 9,000 had already crowded in, of whom 1,000 had been registered in the past two weeks. Hundreds more, like Alawi and his family, have congregated in makeshift shelters made from branches ripped of trees in a shanty town on the edge of the camp, waiting to be registered and admitted. The lucky ones have managed to bring a few cows or donkeys with them, but there is virtually nothing left in the surrounding area for these animals to eat, so they nibble at the growing piles of rubbish and the branches used to construct the shelters. The isolated camp is four hours' drive from Abeche, reachable only on sandy roads through an arid empty plain, where the only sign of life is the occasional cow or camel. At nearby Touloum refugee camp, overcrowding is even worse. Originally built to house 6,000 people, it already accommodates 17,000, and new arrivals keep on coming. "Every day, new people are coming on foot, on donkeys, in convoys," said Alfred Demotibaye, who manages the camp on behalf of Secours catholique pour le développement, the Chadian branch of Caritas. Chad is a poor, landlocked and largely desert country three times the size of France, with virtually no tarred roads or other infrastructure. Kris Kanowski, the UNHCR spokesman in Geneva, recently described it as "one of the most inhospitable terrains in which we have ever had to operate". IMPENDING TRANSPORT PROBLEMS Dei of the WFP office is worried that the private Chadian truck owners whom he relies on to keep the camps supplied with food, may become unwilling to hire out their vehicles during the rainy season, thereby presenting him with a transport crisis. "We rely on private trucks, which are not always in a decent shape, and the owners do not always want to let them go to faraway places where they will get stuck during the rains," he told IRIN. Nor was the government keen to see the truckers churn up the roads in the wet season, he noted. "The authorities do not always want trucks to ply roads that they will then have to repair," Dei said. Relief workers believe that some camps, such as Goz Amer and Esterena near the southern section of the 600-km border with Sudan, will become completely cut off once the rains start. Such places will then only be reachable by helicopters or airdrops. Operating in eastern Chad is not only difficult and expensive because of the distances involved and the lack of decent roads: relief workers say virtually everything they need, be it supplies or trained staff, has to be brought in from other countries because Chad itself has so little to offer. "It is very difficult to find qualified medical personnel, even just to assist," Carla Martinez, MSF-Holland’s head of mission, told IRIN. "The solution is to have more expatriates, but this requires even more funds," she added. FUNDING SHORTFALL And it is not just MSF that is short of funding. Virtually all relief agencies operating in eastern Chad complain that they have less money than they need to prevent an emergency degenerating into a full-scale humanitarian crisis. UNHCR's Janowski told reporters in Geneva: "Of the nearly US $21 million we have asked for from donors, only $13 million have been contributed so far this year. We have now fully spent it and we are using the funds we have borrowed from our operational reserve funds to pay for the programme." While shortages of water and food are the main problems facing relief workers at present, health issues will start to loom much larger once the rains start in June. Relief workers fear that many people will drink contaminated surface water lying in pools and normally dry wadis and that diseases which are already decimating the local livestock population will grow worse. "During the rainy season, numerous animal carcasses will contaminate the wadis, seriously endangering people’s lives," Francoys of MSF Belgium said. "An awful lot of animals have died since the arrival of the refugees on Chadian soil and we do not know why," said Sonia Perrassol, an MSF coordinator based in Abeche. "It is true there is not enough food, but there might have been epidemics, and this is what the Chadian Ministry of Agriculture is trying to find out." "It is difficult to tell how the situation will evolve," said Francoys of MSF Belgium. "The issue of the Janjawid attacks has not been solved yet. Let us hope that a solution will be found for the population stuck in the Darfur region, and that they will get the assistance needed, otherwise we [in Chad] will be faced with a catastrophic situation."