Refugee influx into Chad causes tension, environmental damage – UN official

The massive influx of refugees from Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region into eastern Chad, one of the world’s most arid and poorest regions, is damaging the environment and leading to tensions with the local population, a senior United Nations refugee official has warned.

“We have to focus on projects to help the host communities as well as refugees,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Assistant High Commissioner for Operations Judy Cheng-Hopkins told a news conference in Geneva yesterday after a six-day trip to Chad, where the agency runs 12 camps for more than 200,000 Darfur refugees.

“We have to recognize that the refugees’ presence is causing environmental damage. Lack of water, lack of firewood - we are really talking basic necessities - are causing tensions with the local population,” she said of her first mission since taking office in mid-February.

After more than three years of violence and persecution in Darfur, where fighting between Government forces, pro-government militias and rebels has killed some 180,000 people and displaced 2 million others, the flight of Sudanese continues, with more than 100 Sudanese a day arriving at Gaga camp in eastern Chad.

Ms. Cheng-Hopkins also expressed concern at a worrying trend developing in the south of Chad, where thousands of refugees have arrived from the Central African Republic (CAR) in recent months.

“We really cannot afford in a country as fragile as Chad to have two areas of insecurity, one in the east and one in the south, with all sorts of movements across the borders,” she said, calling the situation in CAR one of the world’s forgotten emergencies.

Since the middle of last year, thousands of people have fled growing insecurity in northern CAR caused by a mixture of armed insurgency against the government, military reprisals against northern villages where the insurgents are thought to be hiding, and widespread banditry.

At the moment, there are some 47,000 refugees from CAR in southern Chad. “The international community has to act now rather than let the south and CAR degenerate to the point where we have another Darfur,” Ms. Cheng-Hopkins said. “We really cannot afford that.”