Under the arms of an acacia tree, Khadija Adam Ahmed, 47, recounted the events that drove her to search for refuge: how Sudanese soldiers stole her herd of 75 cows during an attack six weeks ago at her village’s well; how they shot at her feet to keep her from running and then blocked the road to the refugee camps across the border in Chad.
Still, in the dead of night, Ahmed and 30 families fled their village near Amborou, inside the violence-cursed western Sudanese region of Darfur. They walked around the hills, evaded the soldiers and struggled through mud until they reached the Chadian side of the border.
At the mouth of a sprawling refugee camp called Oure Cassoni, Ahmed stood Wednesday afternoon with dozens of others, mostly women and children, with more children on their backs, all arriving in the same way, all hungry for a tent and a bag of ground corn.
In the past few days, UN officials say, hundreds of new refugees from Sudan have poured into the already overwhelmed camps in Chad. Some, like Ahmed, sneaked around Sudanese soldiers and their allied Arab militiamen. Some were driven out by fresh fighting. Others have emerged from mountain redoubts, drawn by the promise of shelter and food.
This latest influx, though smaller than the flood in the early months of this year, is an alarming barometer of the continuing violence inside Darfur. Even after the UN Security Council on July 30 imposed a 30-day deadline on the Sudanese government to restore stability in Darfur or face unspecified sanctions, UN officials in Chad, relying on accounts by refugees, have been documenting new attacks by Sudanese military and their proxy Arab militias, known as the Janjaweed.
On Aug. 6, these officials said, Janjaweed forces attacked a displaced people’s camp near the Darfur village of Ardjah. On Aug. 10, the agency said, cargo planes dropped bombs on a section of the Djabarmoun mountains commonly used as a hiding place by villagers trying to flee the fighting.
Over the weekend, refugees in Chad reported seeing some 400 Janjaweed on horseback just across the Sudan side of the border near a town called Senete. The next night, two Sudanese men on horseback crossed into Chadian territory and killed four young men, all refugees from Sudan, agency officials said.
The war in western Sudan, pitting the Arab-led government against black Africans in Darfur, was sparked in February 2003 by a guerrilla movement demanding greater political and economic rights for black Africans in the region. It has driven around 180,000 Sudanese refugees, nearly all of them black Darfurians, across the border into Chad, and left thousands of others displaced inside Sudan.
Sudan is under mounting international pressure to rein in the Janjaweed and restore security to Darfur.
Under the aegis of the African Union, peace talks are scheduled to begin next week in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, between Sudanese government officials and their two rebel foes, the Sudan Liberation Army and the Justice and Equality Movement.
