Attacks force new wave of Sudan refugees into Chad
By Matthew Green
N’DJAMENA, Jan 23 (Reuters) – About 15,000 Sudanese refugees fled into neighbouring Chad in the past week to escape intensified attacks by soldiers on villages suspected of harbouring rebels, U.N. officials said on Friday.
The latest exodus represents a sharp increase in the rate at which people are pouring across the border into Chad, swelling a tide of 95,000 Sudanese who have already trekked across the barren frontier since March.
Aid workers are struggling to provide food and medicine to families scattered across several hundred km (miles) of remote and arid wilderness in a humanitarian crisis virtually unknown in the outside world.
“This is one of the biggest influxes of refugees,” said Albert Katumba, a protection officer with the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR, referring to the latest flow across the border.
“It’s due to an intensification of attacks by the Sudanese army,” he told reporters in the Chadian capital N’Djamena.
Katumba said refugees had spoken of government forces pounding villages near the border with artillery, aiming to flush out members of the Sudan Liberation Movement/Army, one of the rebel groups in the Darfur region of western Sudan.
Katumba said local Chadian authorities had provided the figure of an estimated of 15,000 refugees fleeing since January 16, some of them concentrated around the Chadian settlements of Birak and Bali. He said U.N. officials in the area were seeking to establish a more precise figure.
Aid workers said refugees had told them the attacks targeted about 30 villages scattered around Kolbus on the Chad-Sudan border, forcing residents to flee virtually empty handed into arid areas with scant food or water.
The rebels say they are fighting to end what they say is government discrimination against Darfur, accusing Khartoum of arming horse- and camel-mounted militias to force black African villagers to flee so Arabs can take over their land.
U.N. officials say attacks by Sudanese forces on villages have intensified since the failure of peace talks in Chad in mid-December aimed at halting escalating violence.
The conflict between rebels and government forces in the Darfur region of western Sudan has worsened in the past year, even as peace talks to end a separate 20-year civil war in the south of the giant country have made progress.
Attacks in Darfur on isolated villages, with reports of rapes and abductions of girls and bombing raids by government planes have taken place far beyond the reach of the world’s media, leaving the crisis along the border with little coverage.