Spate of hijackings force aid cutbacks

The drivers who navigate eastern Chad’s craterous roads dodging cattle, bathtub sized pot-holes, roadblocks, and since last year ruthless armed carjackers, have no doubt where most of the aid agency vehicles stolen at gunpoint have gone. They say there is a well-known smugglers route that crosses the border into Sudan around Tine, a Chadian town around 150 kilometres northeast of Abeche. 28 aid agency vehicles have been seized since December 2005. And once the highwaymen get over the border, “they do the easiest thing and take them deep into Darfur,” said one driver with two years experience behind the wheel of UN refugee agency (UNHCR) jeep. “No doubt about it, once you get into Darfur, it’s just gone. Nobody will ever find it.” Asked how Chadian authorities can fail to spot a white four-wheel drive covered in colourful aid agency logos, in a country where camel and donkey are the most popular modes of transport, the driver smiled wryly. The road to Tine is lawless, he explained. Drivers, who worry that their vehicle could be the next targeted, wish the Chad government would intervene to stop the hijackings, as requested by the UN’s top Emergency Relief Coordinator, Jan Egeland. Senior aid workers in Abeche admit that they are “in the dark” as to where the attackers are coming from, and who is to blame. Chad soldiers are not above suspicion. An attacker who shot and nearly killed a Spanish worker with the UN children’s agency UNICEF in a hijacking on a busy downtown Abeche street in early May was dressed in military fatigues. And two men who seized an Oxfam jeep at gunpoint from the exposed airstrip 300 km south at Goz Beida later the same month, were confirmed to be from the Chad armed forces. The jeep was returned the same day; the soldiers said they “just needed a ride” and had no ill intentions. But Chadian residents in Abeche say that just because many of the attackers were in uniform does not mean the military is behind all 28 attacks. “Even we cannot distinguish between one man in a military uniform and another. After dark anything can - and does - happen,” said one man as he loaded supplies onto a truck at the main Abeche market. UN officials in the capital N’djamena said that the attacks are a symptom of the lawlessness that has long affected eastern Chad. In a region already awash with small arms, several local prefectures along the border have reportedly set up their own defence militias. INSECURITY FORCES AID CUTS The high number of attacks on aid worker vehicles has forced UN agencies to cut back their support to camps sheltering 160,000 refugees from Sudan’s troubled Darfur region. “Community services, camp management, refugees organisations have all been reduced. We just have to do the minimum now - water, food, sanitation,” said the head of UNHCR’s Abeche office Madami Tall. Fiacre Munezero who visits the camps regularly with the Internews radio project told IRIN that since the cutbacks, there has been a gradual breakdown in community relations inside the camps. “The biggest source of violence now is caused by forced marriages. Kids are starting to refuse the marriages, there are lots of suicides and a lot of men spending their days at bars. There is a lot of fighting and drunkenness.” There have also been reports of riots at camps as refugees demand their three year-old tents be replaced ahead of the three-month rainy season. “The refugees are tired, their lives are getting harder still, and we cannot do as much for them as we want because of the lack of security,” UNHCR’s Tall added. As a result of the growing number of attacks, UNHCR has to make daily water and food deliveries to the nearly all its camps under armed convoy protection of the Chadian army – a measure only previously adopted in war-torn Liberia or Mozambique. The Chadian army “sweep” the roads before aid convoys move, and then armed escorts guard the trucks as they make their way to and from the camps. Also, the passenger jeeps so popular with hijackers rarely travel outside Abeche, limiting staff movements in the camps. Manolo Caviezel, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Abeche which has refused to operate as part of the convoys, said the association with the military risks compromising the perceived impartiality of humanitarian workers. But, as Tall, at UNHCR’s Abeche office said, “we can at least guarantee water services now, which we could not at the height of the attacks”. Few aid workers think the situation will improve unless an international force is posted to the area. They hope that a UN peacekeeping force, which is being negotiated for deployment in western Darfur, could be extended to Chad. Or that a large French army contingent based in eastern Chad could be used to help secure the camps. In the meantime, no-one is willing to make predictions about the future. “The situation has become unreadable,” said UNHCR’s Tall “Everyone is incapable of saying what will happen in two weeks.” NR/SS