Joint police patrols to protect refugee camps in eastern Chad

DAKAR, Sep 1, 2004 (IRIN) — The UN refugee agency UNHCR has invited the
Chadian government to station 180 policemen in camps for Sudanese refugees
in the east of the country in order to maintain order and prevent the
camps from being infiltrated by armed combatants, a UNHCR official said on
Wednesday.

Lino Bordin, the UNHCR deputy head of mission in Chad, told IRIN that an
agreement under which the UNHCR will pay the Chadian government to station
180 paramilitary gendarmes in the nine refugee camps was signed on
Tuesday.

“The gendarmes will have to make sure no armed person enters the camp and
they will have to isolate those people they suspect are combatants from
the other refugees,” he told IRIN by telephone from N’djamena.

The agreement was signed following riots in the heavily overcrowded
Farchana and Breidjing refugee camps in July, during which several
humanitarian workers were attacked and two were injured. Chadian police
subsequently entered the Farchana refugee camp to search for weapons on 22
July and shot dead two people during the ensuing disturbances.

International aid workers resumed working in the two camps a few days
later.

According to the UNHCR, there are currently 160,000 people from Sudan’s
troubled Darfur province living in nine official refugee camps in eastern
Chad and a further 28,000 living in makeshift settlements near the border.

The agreement to station police in the refugee camps, provides for the
gendarmes to maintain order, protect humanitarian workers and food stocks
and prevent armed individuals and suspected combatants from entering the
sites.

The agreement, a copy of which was made available to IRIN, also provides
for the gendarmes to conduct periodic searches for weapons.

UNHCR has agreed to pay for the cost of sending the police to the refugee
camps and has undertaken to provide each police unit with its own vehicle
and radio set.

A UN security source in N’djamena told IRIN on Wednesday that the
situation on the Sudanese border remained tense, but no major incident had
occurred there since four refugees were killed at the village of Senette
in mid-August. They died during a cross border raid by 400 armed men
mounted on horseback, who were suspected of belonging to the
pro-government Janjawid militia movement.

France, which maintains a permanent military garrison in Chad, sent 200
soldiers to the Sudanese frontier in early August to reinforce the
presence of Chadian security forces in the area and prevent cross-border
raids by the Janjawid.