ADÉ, 19 February 2008 (IRIN) - Standing outside one of the many temporary straw huts for displaced Chadians in Adé, a small town five kilometres from the border with Sudan, Yacoub Haroon is wearing the same dirty clothes he wore when he fled his village more than 15 months earlier.

"Since June we haven't received any [food]," he told IRIN in January. The only food the family eats is millet. His children's bodies are covered in a sandy white film. They have no soap to wash themselves.

Haroon's 12-member family is among more than 20,000 displaced people living in small communities along the border with Sudan who have been largely forgotten, local authorities and the few aid agencies working there say.

Some 180,000 Chadians have fled their homes in the last two years because of internal fighting between communities and ethnicities and cross-border attacks by Sudanese militias. A massive aid operation is underway for the majority of them, living in sites further inside the country in eastern Chad.

"[But] people in the villages along the border have nothing," Luke Shankland, project coordinator in Adé for Médécins Sans Frontières (MSF), a non-governmental organisation (NGO) that has set up a health clinic here, told IRIN.

No man's land

Some 100 km from the Sudanese border in the southeastern town of Goz Beida, there are close to 30 aid organisations operating in four adjacent sites for displaced people and one camp for Sudanese refugees. They provide everything from food and clean water, to schools, psychosocial support and recreational activities.

But here in the remote semi-desert border town of Adé, where between 9,000 and 12,000 Chadians displaced have fled to, only one agency, MSF, is present.

The rest have been kept away by insecurity. The nearby border with Sudan is unguarded and easily crossable. Vehicles are rare, telecommunications almost non-existent. Displaced people there said armed Sudanese bandits enter their site at night on horseback to steal the little they have, even their cheap transistor radios.

"When we resist we are victims of machetes and beatings," Aktib Anour Hamid, head of one of the displaced villages from Moudeina, told IRIN.

The border is designated as a "no go" area by the UN Department of Safety and Security, said UN deputy humanitarian coordinator in Chad, Fatma Samoura. "If we are not sure about the conditions of the security, we will not take an unnecessary risk. We will not expose our staff."

EUFOR

Even once the long-awaited European Union military force (EUFOR) and UN peacekeeping mission (MINURCAT) are set up to stabilize eastern Chad, they will not have bases on the border towns, EUFOR spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Patrick Poulain told IRIN. "Rather, we'll be based near refugee camps [inside eastern Chad] and send patrols along the border," he said in December.

Several aid officials expressed concern that the patrols of the remote area would be inadequate and the set-up might even make things worse.

"The banditry could continue or even increase in these zones because other locations [away from the border] will be out of reach for the bandits," Philippe Verstraeten, programme coordinator at the UN Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs told IRIN.

MSF says its workers have been held up at gunpoint three times in Adé in the last four months, yet it has maintained its presence there. "What keeps us here is the need," Shankland said.

"People shouldn't forget that there's a long strip of border habituated by tens of thousands of people who literally don't have security [or access to] food, water or basic healthcare," Shankland said.

Basic needs

Food is the first concern. Flooding during the last rainy season devastated many crops planted by the displaced people. Then the rains stopped early making many of the remaining crops unharvestable. Most of the rest was destroyed when armed men on horseback came with their cattle, which they allowed to graze in the farmers' fields.

Haroon said he harvested fewer than 10 bowls of millet last year. "All the food has been eaten," he said. "We have nothing."

Many of the displaced have tried to find work in the neighbouring Sudanese town of Beda, selling straw, making bricks or cutting wood, but they are now more hesitant because of insecurity along the way. The risks are particularly high for women.

The supply of clean water in Adé, though improving, is still insufficient, at about seven litres per day per person, which is less than half the daily minimum stipulated by the international Sphere standards. The generator running the pumps of boreholes in Adé broke down recently so some children get water from the river nearby, or open holes in the ground, where dirty water mixes with garbage and animal faeces.

There is no functioning school for the 5,000 children in Adé and most children have no place to learn. A community teacher has started giving lessons to a handful of students in the abandoned government school while a displaced person has turned his compound into a makeshift classroom. There, children sit on branches under the gruelling sun. A piece of cardboard serves as a blackboard.

So little available

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) says it cannot offer assistance in every displaced site along the border. "[Displaced people] who chose to live alongside the border usually know where UNHCR offices and official [internally displaced people's] sites are located and know where to get assistance if they need any," said Annette Rehrl, UNHCR spokesperson in Chad.

But the displaced say they often cannot get to big humanitarian hubs, such as Goz Beida, which is at least 80 kilometers away. "We don't have donkeys," village leader Hamid said. "We don't have the means to transport ourselves."

"Other than MSF, there is no organisation helping us," said Hassan Yacin, head of Adé County.

ha/dh/aj

© IRIN. All rights reserved. More humanitarian news and analysis: http://www.IRINnews.org

IRIN news