Sudanese refugees in Chad are desperate for help
By Von Raymond Thibodeaux
BAHAI, Chad, Mar 03, 2004 (dpa) — The pilots of the two jet fighters that attacked Amini Tijanys village in western Sudan made a serious error.
Thats what Tijany kept thinking as the jets bombed their houses, killing six people. Everyone thought the attack was a mistake,” said the 27-year-old agriculturalist. Why would the Sudanese government be targeting us? Most of us are government workers and teachers.”
A month later, end of January, a barrage of mortars suddenly tore through the afternoon haze, demolishing several houses and setting the village ablaze. The second attack made Tijany realize that the first was not an accident.
As people started to flee, Tijany said, Sudanese troops and fighters on horses and camels tried to cordon off the village. Most of the men and teenage boys were either shot or abducted, she said.
She and hundreds of others in her village fled to Chad, where more than 110,000 Sudanese refugees are encamped near the country’s 370- mile border with Sudan.
Like most of the Sudanese refugees in Chad, she brought only what she could carry: a few changes of clothes, a blanket and a sleeping mat.
And like most refugees from Sudan’s Darfur region, she is just now coming to terms with the notion that Khartoums Arab-dominated government no longer wants them.
Just weeks ago, Tijany was teaching farmers in Um Buru, a village in Sudan’s Darfur region, how to up their crop yields and care for their livestock.
Now, she and a dozen other women from her village, fellow teachers, have set up camp in a dry riverbed near Bahai, about 12 miles from the Sudan border. They survive on portions of sorghum donated by the local farmers and careful rations of water.
Many suspect the attacks are racial. Nearly all the Sudanese refugees are indigenous black Africans. The government is not targeting the regions Arabs.
The U.N. estimates that more than 600,000 Sudanese have fled the fighting in the country’s western region. And refugees continue to pour into Chad with reports of continued attacks by Arab militias. This, despite the Khartoum governments claim that fighting had ceased in Darfur.
Their shelters are like bird nests, clusters of broken branches arranged in a circle, with occasional scarves to keep out the wind. At night, temperatures fall near the freezing point. Due to the lack of grazing land and water, thousands of dead animals lie like sand moguls in the remote, windswept desert.
Aid groups fear that without help from the international community, the refugees are next.
We didn’t have enough money to respond to the crisis because our attention was being focused on other regions like Iraq and Congo,” said Yvan Sturm, the U.N. refugee commissions director in Chad. Because of the lack of water, our camps can only hold less than half the number of refugees.”
The current peace talks in Kenya between the Khartoum government and the SPLA, a rebel group in the countrys southern region, do not deal with the crisis in Darfur. “We cannot build peace at the cost of the people in Darfur”, warns U.N. commissioner for refugees Ruud Lubbers, after visiting the Sudanese refugees in Chad.
Local authorities in Western Chad have vowed to protect and, as long as possible, feed the Sudanese refugees.
The tribes of this region are part of the same tribe,” said Tom Dillo, the regional governor for Tine, where more than 40,000 Sudanese refugees have found shelter.
But without help from the international community, Ill have nothing for these refugees except soil to bury them with.”
For now, it’s a race against time as aid agencies jockey to put camps and distribution centres in place before the May rainy season, when what few roads there are in the region will be impassable.