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Sudan Tribune

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UN to launch emergency program to aid Sudanese refugees

GENEVA, Jan 15, 2004 (Xinhua) — The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) announced Thursday that it would launch an emergency program to aid Sudanese refugees driven by the civil war in Sudan to neighboring Chad.

“We have decided to put together an emergency program for three months to get the necessary food and non-food items to these refugees,” Tom Eric Vraalsen, UN secretary-general’s Special Envoy to Sudan, said in Geneva at a press conference.

“This program amounts to 4.3 million US dollars. What we want to do is to buy food locally in the southern part of Chad where there is a good harvest, or buy it in Cameroon, and freight it to Abeche in eastern Chad. We’ll use Abeche as a central point from which we can truck food to the destinations where the refugees will be,” he said.

The whole UN family — including the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the World Health Organization (WHO) — and some non-governmental organizations ( NGOs) will all take part in the aid program, he said.

Following an uprising by the Sudanese Liberation Movement in western Sudan’s Darfur state last April, Sudanese refugees started fleeing to Chad.

Vraalsen said the number of Sudanese refugees in Chad now has been estimated to exceed 90,000.

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