Chad using Darfur refugees as bargaining chips – Sudan
February 12, 2008 (KHARTOUM) — Sudan accused Chad Tuesday of using some 300,000 Darfur refugees as bargaining chips in the growing dispute between the two countries, a day after Chad’s prime minister threatened to expel the refugees if the international community failed to transfer them elsewhere.
Prime Minister Nouradin Koumakoye’s threat followed repeated accusations that Sudan is fomenting violence in Chad because Darfur refugees are sheltering in the country’s east. Chadian rebels often clash with government forces in eastern Chad and attacked the capital earlier this month before being driven off.
Sudan has denied involvement, and the country’s refugee commissioner, Mohamed Ahmed al-Aghbash, said Tuesday any move by Chad to expel Darfur refugees would be “a violation of the Geneva international laws and convention”.
“This is a mere trading and bargaining in the issue of the Sudanese refugees along the borderline with Chad,” al-Aghbash was quoted as saying by Sudan’s official news agency. The issue is “a humanitarian question that shouldn’t be linked to political differences.”
Under the 1951 U.N. refugee convention drafted in Geneva, its signatories, which include Chad, can’t return a refugee to countries where his or her life or freedom could be at risk on racial, religious or political grounds.
Chad has threatened previously to expel the Darfur refugees, who have fled five years of fighting between the region’s ethnic African rebel groups and Sudan’s Arab-dominated government that has killed over 200,000 people.
After attacks by Chadian rebels in April, 2006, President Idriss Deby said he would force them back into Sudan if the international community didn’t take action to prevent Sudan from destabilizing his country. Deby backed down a few days later under intense international pressure.
Over the weekend, about 12,000 more Darfur people fled across the border into eastern Chad after air strikes by the Sudanese military on several towns.
An estimated 280,000 Sudanese already were living in camps in eastern Chad, and the U.N. says some 140,000 Chadians in that area also have been displaced by violence linked to the Darfur conflict.
(AP)