Actress Farrow takes her Darfur campaign to Chad

Nov 14, 2006 (ABECHE, Chad) — US actress and UN envoy Mia Farrow has arrived in eastern Chad, where Arab militias have launched bloody raids on villages like those across the border in Sudan’s strife-torn Darfur region.

“I’m here to witness the suffering and go back to the United States to report it, to make people aware of this situation,” Farrow said on arrival in the barracks town of Abeche, north of regions where the attacks have claimed at least 300 lives this month.

Farrow, an ambassador for the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), was scheduled to visit a camp housing refugees from civil war that erupted in Darfur when rebels took up arms in February 2003. Sudan’s army is widely accused of working with Arab militias called the Janjaweed to crush the rebels and raze villages in a scorched-earth policy.

At least 200,000 people have died in Darfur, according to UN figures, while 2.5 million have been displaced. Hundreds of thousands of them fled into Chad, where local villagers say attacks very similar to Janjaweed raids began this month, targeting people of black African origin.

“I’ve been to Darfur twice,” Farrow said Tuesday. “But it’s difficult to talk about the Darfur crisis without including the east of Chad. The Darfur crisis crossed the border to the neighouring country, to the east of Chad.”

Farrow, who has campaigned for strong international intervention in Darfur, said that she also wanted to go to a town in the part of Chad where villagers told UN relief workers they were attacked by a group of Arabs about 200 strong on horseback, with accompanying vehicles.

“If possible, I want also to go to the region of Goz Beida to witness and report what is happening there,” she told AFP. Displaced people who reached Goz Beida in the past two weeks say they saw their village huts and crops torched by the Arab raiders.

The government of Chad’s President Idriss Deby Itno on Tuesday imposed a state of emergency across most of the country because of the unrest, which N’Djamena has blamed on Sudan.

Khartoum denies the allegations by both Chad and neighbouring Central African Republic that it is out to destabilise the two countries. It also refutes charges that it directly backs the Janjaweed in Darfur.

(AFP)