Mass Sudanese exodus creates “invisible crisis”
By Matthew Green
ABECHE, Chad, Jan 29 (Reuters) – Drive through the wilderness playing host to an exodus of refugees fleeing attacks in western Sudan and the absence of one thing seems striking — people.
Tens of thousands of women and children are scattered along the 600 km (375 mile) border with neighbouring Chad, huddling in small groups in dried out river beds or sleeping under the branches of acacia trees.
They can be difficult to find, forcing aid workers to drive for hours through a landscape of whitish sand and heaps of granite boulders in search of new arrivals fending for themselves on the frontier.
“I came here because there was fighting in our town and bombing by planes,” said Zubaida Saleh, 25, a Sudanese refugee in the border town of Tine. “In Chad life is very difficult,” she said. “There’s no clean water.”
Relief agencies say the dispersed nature of the influx has created an “invisible emergency” that for months went almost unnoticed, delaying the response of the outside world and limiting media coverage of the refugees’ plight.
For the few agencies that have come to help, the logistical problems posed by the three-day drive to the border from the Chadian capital N’Djamena and the hostile landscape has made their work harder.
The frontier is one of the remotest corners of Africa, a land joining the southern fringes of Libyan desert were little has changed in centuries. Horsemen in white turbans canter across the plains with spears, camels outnumber cars.
The towns near the border are built of mud, lacking running water or electricity. Roads consist of rough tracks.
“What makes this operation challenging is the remoteness of the terrain, and the difficulty of finding the refugees,” said Helene Caux, a spokeswoman for the U.N. refugee agency.
“Here it’s an invisible emergency,” she said, speaking in the town of Abeche in eastern Chad.
NO HELP AT HAND
Reuters reporters watched this week as Sudanese families trudged across the border, many barefoot, seeking safety from attacks by government Antonov bombers and marauders ravaging the Darfur region of western Sudan.
Medical charity Medecins sans Frontieres runs a field hospital on the border, but for refugees pleading for food from visitors there was no help on offer.
At least 35,000 people have poured across the frontier in the past two months, swelling the total number sheltering in Chad to more than 100,000 since the flight began in March.
Unlike refugee crises in Kosovo or after the Rwandan genocide, which were beamed around the world, the Chad border offers no images of a mass movement for television, making fund raising efforts more difficult for charities.
The United Nations says it started this month to move families to camps where it can provide food, but the lack of water in the arid land has limited the number of useable sites.
U.N. workers say they have also distributed food, blankets and other items to some 37,000 refugees in the past few weeks and more charities are beginning to make enquiries about starting work, but many refugees remain beyond help.
“For us this is a huge crisis,” said Nuria Serra, field coordinator for Medecins sans Frontieres. “Someone must react.”