Sudan refugees say beaten back as they head home
By Nick Tattersall
TINE, Chad/Sudan border, April 15 (Reuters) – Sudanese refugees in Chad say Sudanese soldiers are preventing them from returning home and have beaten back women searching for food and firewood.
At least 7,000 black African refugees are living in crude shelters on the Chadian side of the dusty border town of Tine after being hounded out of Sudan’s western Darfur region by bombing raids and government-backed Arab militias.
Aid agencies have set up camps in this remote corner of Africa to provide medical care and food, but in Tine the refugees live on pulses from the bush mixed with water.
“Some women went to get wood. The Sudanese soldiers whipped them. Even yesterday. We could see them,” teacher Bakheit Hashim, 35, said on Wednesday, gesturing across the dried-up riverbed that cuts through Tine and separates the two African nations.
Civilians have borne the brunt of the conflict in Darfur, where two rebel groups have been battling government troops and marauding horse-riding Arab militias. Fear still reigns, despite a 45-day truce which came into force on Sunday.
U.N. officials have described the violence in Darfur as ethnic cleansing, and the Africans chased out of Sudan into its impoverished neighbour Chad now seem stranded.
Slouching in the shade of a tree in the riverbed in this remote desert town, four unarmed Sudanese soldiers denied they had stopped refugees from crossing back into Sudan.
But groups of refugees standing on the other side of the border, where Chadian troops patrol in pickup trucks, disagreed.
“They have tried to go back to get food from their homes because there is nothing here,” said another teacher, Shrief Ishag, 45. “If it is a woman, she will be punished or even raped. If it is a man, he will be killed.”
Human rights group Amnesty International said in a statement on Thursday they had reports of systematic rape of women in Darfur, adding that the extent of the problem had yet to be realised.
“Women will not tell you easily if such a thing happens to them. In our culture, it is a shame, and women will hide this in their hearts so that the men do not hear about it,” Amnesty quoted one refugee women as saying.
MALNUTRITION
U.N. officials say some 110,000 refugees have fled to Chad, although the data is several months old and many more sheltering just across the border have yet to be tallied.
Many of the refugees have been in Tine for months, stranded without food and sheltering from fierce sandstorms as they wait for aid convoys to ferry them to camps to get food and water.
Aid workers in Tine say they find children every day with severe malnutrition, though the number of people with wounds from bullets, shrapnel or mines appears to be dropping. Aid workers are also battling a meningitis epidemic in the area.
They believe there are another 5,000-6,000 refugees around the town of Bahai further north and say they must be taken to camps where they can be fed quickly.
“The main problem here is water. People can’t find any that they can drink. And there is no food. Only those who get to the camps get food,” said Abdulayeh Saleh, the Red Cross co-ordinator for the region around Tine and Bahai.