Agencies underestimating numbers of refugees from W. Sudan, says advocacy group

NAIROBI, May 21, 2004(IRIN) — The UN and aid agencies have underestimated the numbers of refugees from Sudan’s Darfur region who have crossed into Chad, and must urgently revise their appeals to donors for more funding, according to the advocacy group, Refugees International (RI).

In a statement released this week, RI said a combined revised appeal from UN agencies in Chad needed to take into account “the new realities” on the ground. These included almost doubling the numbers of refugees used by agencies as statistics for planning purposes, and the fact that the refugees would be in Chad for at least another year.

“After completing a two-week assessment mission to eastern Chad, RI has concluded that the real number of Darfur refugees there is around 200,000, not the 110,000 planning figure that has been used by the United Nations and aid agencies,” said RI. Donors would also need to respond with urgency to the appeal, it added.

A spokeswoman for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Kitty McKinsey, told IRIN that UNHCR was currently working with the figure of 125,000 refugees. “We are aware that the actual figure may be higher,” she said. “We are working urgently with our Chadian partners to put together more accurate figures.”

The “fluid population” was extremely difficult to count, she said, because the refugees were constantly on the move.

Laura Melo, a spokeswoman for the World Food Programme (WFP), said the organisation was “currently revising its appeal and its working figures” to address the increasing needs in Chad. “The budget revision that is prepared targets a number close to the one referred to by RI,” she said, adding that the document was not finalised yet.

The challenges involved in assisting refugees in eastern Chad, who are scattered along a 600-km stretch of border between the two countries, are enormous. The area is extremely hostile and arid, water is extremely scarce and expensive to find, and the infrastructure needed to transport aid is extremely poor.

To move supplies from the Cameroonian port of Douala to eastern Chad took between two and three weeks, RI reported. As a result, malnutrition rates in refugee camps were on the rise, it said, as well as reports of deaths among refugees, especially the elderly.

In recent weeks the international community has been heavily criticised for its lack of response to the refugees’ plight. Funding for the crisis has been slow and inadequate.

According to Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), malnutrition inside the refugee camps is actually worse than outside because they are so overcrowded. Sanitation facilities in most of the camps were also “totally inadequate”, said the agency last week.

In one camp there was one latrine per 400 refugees. “This is 20 times greater than the international standard of a maximum of 20 people per latrine. It’s absolutely unacceptable.”

Although UNHCR and international NGOs had had teams on the ground in Chad for months, progress had been “painfully slow” as the crisis escalated, said MSF, noting that sufficient shelter, food and water had not been organised, and that some of the camps were filled to double their capacity.

Ron Redmond, UNHCR’s chief spokesman in Geneva, told IRIN that the camps were overcrowded because water was so difficult to find, which hampered UNHCR’s ability to build more of them. “There are so many people and so few suitable sites,” he said.

Meanwhile the tens of thousands of refugees – over 58,000 have been transferred to camps with a further 10,000 moving spontaneously – who are not in the camps continue to be under threat from Janjawid militia incursions along the Chadian border, says UNHCR.

Rains, which will begin in earnest in June, are also about to largely cut them off from aid. Within a month, the numerous river beds or wadis in the area will fill up, slicing the area into small pieces and making the settlements of scattered refugees unreachable by land, according to RI.

Returning to Sudan is out of the question. Interviewees reported to RI that they would not consider returning to Sudan unless the Janjawid militias were disarmed, and they were given strong security guarantees, possibly in the form of a multinational UN military presence.

A number said they wanted to be transferred to camps in Tine Chad, but were being prevented from leaving Bahai (in the north of western Darfur straddling the border) by local authorities who felt they were providing the town with economic support, Fidele Lumeya of RI told IRIN.

URGENT STEPS NEEDED

WFP was currently feeding 64,000 refugees in the camps and was pre-positioning food for 150,000, Melo told IRIN. It was also “exploring a corridor” through the Chadian desert along which it could transport food during the rainy season, and was in the process of organising a fleet of nine trucks to transport food from Abeche to eastern Chad.

Pre-positioning food for the southern area along the border was a priority, she said, as it would be cut off first by the rains. In addition to supplying food in the camps, food for 22,000 refugees would also be distributed in the southern area of Pizi.

McKinsey said the six refugee camps that had been set up would rise to nine within two weeks. Meanwhile, UNHCR was continuing to search for water and new sites to build more camps, and would continue to transport the refugees during the rainy season.

But according to MSF and RI, further steps need to be taken urgently to assist the refugees to survive. “More supplies, more aid staff on the ground, greater efficiency by UNHCR and international NGOs, whatever it takes,” said Donatella Massai, who is responsible for MSF’s operations in Chad.

The UN needed to establish a more effective aid coordination structure in Abeche; the governments of Chad and Cameroon needed to designate an agency to expedite the handling of relief supplies; and UN agencies and donors needed to approach the French army in Chad to use its equipment and expertise, said RI.

“One option would be the use of French military planes and helicopters, which are based in Chad, to move shipments to what will become mostly stranded camps during the rainy season,” suggested RI.

UNHCR could also use French expertise and hydrological equipment, “as time is of the essence”, it said.