U.N. to move Sudan refugees beyond reach of attack
NAIROBI, Jan 9 (Reuters) – Aid workers will start moving 15,000 refugees who fled to Chad from Sudan away from the frontier next week to protect them from cross-border attacks by Sudanese militia and aircraft, a U.N. spokeswoman said on Friday.
Many of the thousands of refugees fleeing a conflict in western Sudan tell of militiamen mounted on horses and camels who storm into villages in at dawn to rape and kill, according to accounts gathered by aid workers.
Aid workers say the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region is one of the most neglected in the world, pitting rebels fighting the Khartoum government against government forces and camel-riding “Janjaweed” militia.
Rebels say they are fighting to end what they say is government discrimination against their arid region.
The United Nations says some 30,000 Sudanese fled into Chad in December alone, bedding down along 600 km (370 miles) of barren frontier where they are still vulnerable to attack.
“They are not safe on the border,” said Kitty McKinsey, spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency UNCHR in Nairobi.
“There have been raids from militias from the Sudan side, the refugees have also been attacked by a helicopter and plane,” she said, adding that there had been a number of cross-border attacks in Chad in the last few weeks.
McKinsey said the United Nations hoped to start moving an initial group of refugees on January 15 to a camp being set up at Farchana, 55 km (34 miles) from the border with Sudan.
Observers say the conflict in western Sudan has escalated in the past year, threatening to undermine progress made at peace talks in Kenya to end a 20-year civil war in the south of Sudan.
“We’ve been warning about this situation for months,” said said Ron Redmond, a UNCHR spokesman in Geneva.
“The conflict has sent an estimated 95,000 people fleeing across the border since the start of last year, and hundreds of thousands of others are believed to be displaced inside Darfur.”
He said one refugee elder who had just arrived in a major camp at Djoran in Chad said 20-30 people were arriving there daily and that there had been increasing attacks by Sudanese militias on villages across the border in the past 10 days.
“They are fleeing from pillage, theft, butchery, and from villages torched and burned to the ground by the various armed groups,” said Christiane Berthiaume of the World Food Programme, the United Nation’s emergency food aid arm.
Speaking at a briefing in Geneva, she said the food agency had not received any funds from donors after appealing for $11.2 million to feed refugees in Chad last month.
Relief workers say the reports of killings, rapes and abduction are difficult to verify as humanitarian agencies are not able to work in Darfur.