French begin airlift to Darfur refugees in Chad
GOZ-BEIDA, Chad, Sept 7 (AFP) — French soldiers based in Chad on Tuesday began airlifting supplies to Darfur refugees based in southeastern Chad, across the border from their native, war-wracked part of Sudan.
“The aim of the operation is to see that the two camps have sufficient food until the end of the rainy season,” the spokesman for French forces in the central African country, Captain Frederic Vareilles, told AFP.
The camps are located at Goz-Beida, 200 kilometres (125 miles) southeast of the town of Abeche, where the troops have mounted the airlift. In the morning, a C-160 Transall cargo plane flew to Goz-Beida carrying seven tonnes of flour.
On arrival, the supplies were to be given to the UN World Food Programme (WFP), whose workers would distribute it to the 34,000 refugees in the region.
In all, about 200,000 people from Darfur have fled to Chad to escape starvation and atrocities at the hands of a pro-Khartoum Arab militia known as the Janjaweed, who began razing villages, raping women and massacring the black African people after two rebel groups rose up against the government in February last year.
The war in Darfur has claimed up to 50,000 lives and the WFP on Tuesday stated in Nairobi that while it had managed to start getting food to nearly a million people within the region, “this fell alarmingly short of its target of 1.2 million people.”
“Goz-Beida is inaccessible by road at this time of year,” Vareilles said, echoing the statement from the WFP in Nairobi about conditions on the Sudanese side of the border.
The French operation will include daily flights until Saturday and take in 35 tonnes of food, the captain added.
French soldiers began an operation to help Sudanese refugees in the country on July 31 and have since managed to get 600 tonnes of supplies as far as Abeche, Vareilles said.
The French army has also started patrolling the border between Chad and Sudan to ensure the safety of the refugees, who had earlier been reporting attacks against them launched from Sudan.
UN agencies have described the consequences of the conflict in Darfur as the world’s worst current humanitarian crisis.
“August was the height of the rainy season in Darfur and large swathes of decrepit roads were rendered impassable, as trucks laden with food struggled to reach Darfur on the long drive from Port Sudan on the Red Sea,” the WFP director for Sudan, Ramiro Lopes da Silva, said in Tuesday’s statement sent to AFP in the Kenyan capital.
“Insecurity substantially cut the number of people who could be reached, while clashes between government forces and Sudan Liberation Army (SLA) rebels were more frequent than in recent months, closing areas accessible by UN aid agencies,” it said.
Talks being held in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, to resolve the Darfur crisis have been under way for three weeks but made little progress.