Sudanese refugees fleeing into Chad to escape air attacks - UN agency

Hundreds of Sudanese refugees are streaming into Chad to escape new air attacks, reportedly by government forces, in Sudan's war-scarred Darfur region, pushing the number of Sudanese who have recently fled to the neighbouring country to nearly 70,000, according to the UN refugee agency.

"The general situation of the refugees is very bad," said Tane Bamba, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Emergency Coordinator in the Chadian capital of Ndjamena. "It is the rainy season, but the refugees have no shelter."

The lack of safe drinking water had forced refugees to drink from stagnant pools of rainwater and there were cases of respiratory tract illnesses, malaria and diarrhoea, Mr. Bamba added. The region is prone to high desert temperatures during the day and chilly weather at night. He said many of the new arrivals were women and children. Many of their men, they said, had been killed in fighting or had stayed behind to fight.

A UN inter-agency mission which travelled to eastern Chad last week witnessed the arrival of more than 800 new refugees into areas close to the border town of Agan, some 180 kilometres from the town of Abeche. It was the second UN assessment mission to the area in nearly two weeks.

An emergency team from UNHCR's headquarters in Geneva was also set to fly to Chad to provide emergency assistance to the "desperate" refugees, the agency said in a news release.

The newly-arriving refugees told the team, which included UNHCR, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the UN World Food Programme (WFP), that they fled when government forces bombed their villages last Wednesday.

Over the past few years, conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan has pitted nomadic groups against sedentary agricultural people. Early this year, the Sudan Liberation Army - the military wing of the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) - took up arms to protest the perceived lack of government protection of the farming communities in Darfur. The government responded militarily. Refugees say the conflict has heightened ethnic tensions between Sudanese of Arab origin and those of African origin in western Sudan.