Race against rains for Sudanese refugees on Chad border

By Nick Tattersall

IRIBA, Chad, April 11 (Reuters) – Thousands of refugees from Sudan risk being stranded on the border with Chad and exposed to attacks by militiamen unless they can be ferried to camps before the rainy season starts, aid workers say.

“We need more vehicles, petrol and food. My opinion is that we underestimated the situation here and the response has come too late,” said Emile Belem, who heads the U.N. refugee agency (UNHCR) office in Iriba, on Saturday.

The U.N. says 110,000 men, women and children have fled to Chad from Sudan’s Darfur region, where Khartoum has used aerial bombardment to smash a rebel revolt and a proxy force of armed, horse-riding Arab militia raids farming communities at dawn.

Aid agencies have set up camps in this remote, impoverished corner of Africa to provide medical care and food in what officials call one of the world’s worst humanitarian disasters.

Behind Belem’s office in Iriba, a small administrative settlement 60 km (38 miles) from the contested border town of Tine, stand 14 open-back Red Cross trucks.

The vehicles are meant to travel to the frontier to fetch refugees still fleeing from Sudan across the empty savannah — but they stand stranded without fuel.

Across the compound, a warehouse meant to hold cereal, sorghum and oil to supply a camp of 6,000 for a month, holds less than half that amount because the contractor organising the transport has run out of money to pay the drivers.

“You can’t keep bringing people in and dumping them and not giving them anything to eat,” said Dave Coddington, a team leader at Catholic Relief Services, an aid group which is helping distribute food in the refugee camps.

“It’s an embarrassment for the U.N,” he said in his mud-brick office in Guereda, a dusty town without electricity some 80 km (50 miles) south of Iriba.

Few refugees in eastern Chad show signs of acute malnutrition but as more people cross the border with nothing but a few pots and pans aid workers are starting to worry.

“My children are crying for milk. They are getting no proteins, which is giving them problems with their eyes,” said Mariam Bakhid Ahmat, who was brought with her seven children in an aid convoy to a camp near Iriba.

The Chad-Sudan border at Tine is a three-day drive from Chad’s capital N’Djamena, much of it through deserted and blisteringly hot savannah along bone-jarring roads and tracks.

The roads in the far east are accessible only to the sturdiest of jeeps and trucks, presenting relief workers with a logistical nightmare. And even these roads risk being blocked to food convoys by rains due in the coming months.

Aid workers say donors are reluctant to stump up the cash to fly supplies from N’Djamena, because so much of the money they have given is already tied up in getting the food to the land-locked nation in the first place.

“When there’s a catastrophe coming, people don’t react until they are counting the dead,” said Simon Salimini, a coordinator with the World Food Programme (WFP).