UN, NGOs to pull out staff from 3 east Chad towns
Dec 4, 2006 (N’DJAMENA) — U.N. agencies and NGOs will withdraw staff from three towns in violence-torn eastern Chad, leaving skeleton teams to help run camps housing 110,000 Sudanese refugees in the area, a U.N. official said on Monday.
The planned pullout from Guereda, Iriba and Bahai in the eastern Biltine district bordering Sudan follows recent fighting there between Chadian government forces and rebels.
“Because of the continuing deterioration of the security situation, there was a U.N. system-wide decision that we would relocate all international and local staff from Guereda, Iriba and Bahai,” Helene Caux of the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR told Reuters by phone.
She said more than 200 U.N. and NGO relief personnel would be moved over the next few days, by air or road.
Rebel fighters from a coalition aiming to end President Idriss Deby’s 16-year rule in the oil-producing central African state entered Guereda, 30 km (19 miles) from the border with Sudan’s Darfur region, on Friday. Chad government forces were back in control of Guereda on Monday, security sources said.
Caux said the UNHCR would leave a few local staff in the three towns to help run six refugee camps sheltering 110,000 Sudanese who have fled political and ethnic conflict in Darfur. The teams will help ensure the refugees get water, healthcare and food.
“We are still committed to serving the refugees,” and the U.N. will review security again in one month, said Caux. “The whole of east Chad is volatile and insecure.”
Last month, rebels briefly occupied Chad’s main eastern city Abeche, the centre of humanitarian operations in the vast eastern border area where a total of 218,000 Sudanese refugees are housed in 12 camps. The UNHCR is also looking after a further 90,000 Chadians displaced by violence.
Non-essential U.N. and NGO staff had already been evacuated to the capital N’Djamena or moved to Cameroon.
The rebels have launched a series of raids and offensives in east Chad this year with mobile columns of pick-up trucks mounted with machineguns and rocket launchers. Often they occupy towns and villages for just a few hours before melting away into the desert or to mountain hideouts.
The government accuses Sudan of backing the attacks, a charge denied by Khartoum.
Former colonial power France is giving the Chadian army logistical and intelligence support, provided by a French military contingent including Mirage fighters stationed in Chad.
Deby, who himself took power through an armed revolt from the east in 1990, said last week Chad was ready to allow an international peacekeeping force to deploy on its eastern border with Sudan to protect the refugees and Chadian villagers.
Chad has proposed moving the refugee camps to sites several hundred kilometres west of the Sudanese border.
(Reuters)