SISI, Chad, 18 August 2004 — Marauding Arab militias in Sudan’s Darfur region continue to prey on refugees and are crossing into Chad to steal cattle and kill civilians, UN officials and Chadian villagers said yesterday. The United Nations also added malaria to the list of threats facing more than a million displaced Sudanese, who are dying at a rate of about 1,000 a day from hunger-related diseases in what the UN calls the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.
In Sisi, a remote village on Chad’s border with Sudan, villagers said the Sudanese militiamen, known as Janjaweed, had raided as recently as Aug. 8 to rustle 260 cattle. “They killed a herdswoman that day. Since the start of the trouble they have killed 15 civilians from here,” said Adama Hassan Hamadi, an elderly man who spoke for the village.
“We are not at peace because our village is right next to the border. The Janjaweed come to take our cattle, especially before the rains, and if we refuse to hand them over they kill us,” Hamadi said
In Geneva, the UN refugee agency UNHCR said 525 refugees from Darfur had been registered in eastern Chad over the past three days, signaling a possible fresh exodus after a two-month lull. The new arrivals had reported “constant looting” by the Janjaweed who had also blocked people trying to leave, said UNHCR spokeswoman Jennifer Pagonis.
The UN Security Council has given Sudan about two more weeks to prove it has made progress in improving Darfur’s security situation or face unspecified sanctions. The UN estimates that violence in Darfur, where rebels took up arms in early 2003, has killed 50,000 people and displaced some 1.2 million, including about 200,000 now in Chad.
Rebels and rights groups accuse the Khartoum government of backing the Janjaweed - a name that may derive from the Arabic for “devils on horseback” — to crush the rebellion and conduct a campaign of ethnic cleansing against Darfur’s non-Arabs.
Sudan, which put the Darfur death toll at about 5,000 and denies supporting the Janjaweed, has pledged to the UN to set up safe areas for the displaced, disarm the militias and cease military operations. UN envoy Jan Pronk urged Sudan’s authorities on Sunday to speed up the process and said the Janjaweed remained a threat.
Health officials said recent heavy rains had added to the misery in the camps for the internally displaced by creating breeding grounds for mosquitoes that carry malaria.
