Sudan dismisses U.N. warning of new refugee exodus to Chad

KHARTOUM, Aug 21 (AFP) — Sudanese Foreign Minister Mustafa Osman Ismail Saturday dimissed a UN warning that some 30,000 people displaced by the civil war in Darfur were poised to join a mounting exodus to neighbouring Chad.

“More than 30,000 refugees from Chad have already returned to Darfur and another 7,000 are in the process of going back to their homes districts,” the minister told reporters.

He was responding to a report published by the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees Friday in which it warned some 30,000 displaced people in a camp in West Darfur were poised to flee to Chad unless an international force provided security.

“We are concerned that such an influx of 30,000 refugees in one single spot along the Chad-Sudan border, if it were to materialize, would put a strain on our ability to care for and feed refugees in our camps there,” the UN agency said.

The UNHCR’s director of Sudan operations, Jean-Marie Fakhouri, met with representatives in the camp at Masteri, 50 kilometers (30 miles) south of the state capital of Geneina.

“This group of displaced people said they want protection from UN peacekeepers,” the agency’s statement said.

“If they do not get international security guarantees, they said they will all cross to Chad as soon as the rain-swollen river that marks the border with Sudan dries up.”

Most of the displaced people in the Masteri camp fled attacks on their own villages earlier this year but complain they remain prey to the depredations of the state-sponsored Arab militias let loose in Darfur after an ethnic minority uprising early last year, the UNHCR said.

Some 200,000 refugees from Darfur have already fled to Chad. The United Nations says there are more than a million more people who have been displaced from their homes inside Sudan.