UNHCR chief in Chad as part of Sudan assessment mission
Aug 26, 2005 (Ndjamena) — The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, who heads the world body’s refugee agency, arrived in Chad’s capital on Friday from Sudan’s conflict-wracked Darfur region across the border.
Guterres made no statement on coming to Ndjamena from Darfur via the eastern Chad town of Abeche, in a region home to more than 200,000 Sudanese refugees, an AFP correspondent reported.
The UNHCR chief was scheduled to hold talks with President Idriss Deby as part of a 10-day assessment devoted to the conflict in Darfur, scene of one of Africa’s worst humanitarian crises, which he left on Thursday, and to the after-effects of war in south Sudan.
Ethnic conflict in Darfur between rebel groups drawn from a local population of black African origin and Arab militias waging a scorched earth campaign to crush the insurgents has since February 2003 displaced some two million people, according to UNHCR figures.
On Thursday, Guterres visited a refugee camp inside Chad for 15,000 of the refugees at Iridimi, 200 kilometres (125 miles) northeast of Abeche, before he headed on 700 kilometres westwards to Ndjamena.
He made no comment in Ndjamena on talks with local authorities and officials of relief agencies and charities in the east of Chad, but on Tuesday had talks with Sudanese government officials in Khartoum.
African Union mediators in Tanzania, after a round of informal talks between the warring parties, on Wednesday announced a resumption on September 15 of full peace negotiations between two Darfur rebel groups and Khartoum after months of stalling.
The conflict has killed 300,000 people and Guterres, a Portuguese former prime minister, put Sudan’s wars in Darfur and in the south high among his priorities on becoming head of the Geneva-based UNHCR on June 15.
From Chad, Guterres is due to go on Saturday to south Sudan, where a conflict that lasted for more than 20 years until last January killed at least 1.5 million other Sudanese.
That separate war, also partly an ethnic one pitting an Arabic-dominated north against a Christian or animist black majority south, has driven 4.6 million people into displacement within Sudan, while 500,000 are in camps in Kenya, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
After meeting Guterres on Tuesday, Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail called for “redoubling efforts in the coming period for the repatriation of Sudanese refugees from neighbouring countries”.
In May, when UNHCR staff were carrying out a census at the Iridimi camp in Chad, several were injured by some of the refugees who violently protested at such a count. Many accuse the Janjaweed militia in Darfur, backed by Khartoum, of genocide, an allegation taken up by the US State Department.
On Monday, the refugee commissioner is scheduled to fly to Kenya, which is a base for the humanitarian operation for south Sudan and also hosts around 65,000 Sudanese refugees.
AFP/ST