By Stephanie Hancock

GOUROUKOUM, Chad, March 28 (Reuters) - Chadian civilians displaced by violence in the east appealed for United Nations military protection on Wednesday, but a top U.N. official said political solutions were needed to make peacekeeping effective.

Attacks in eastern Chad by armed raiders and inter-ethnic conflict between Arabs and non-Arabs have killed several hundred people in recent months and forced 120,000 from their homes.

"There is no security and we live in constant fear," Abderamane Adam Issa, a displaced villager living in a camp at Gouroukoum near Goz Beida in southeastern Chad, told Reuters during a visit by U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes.

Issa is among 12,000 civilians who occupy flimsy straw shelters dotted across a dust-swept valley.

The desolate border area is also sheltering 232,000 Sudanese refugees who have fled the war spilling over from neighbouring Sudan's Darfur region, where fighting between rebels and government forces has killed tens of thousands since 2003.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last month recommended sending up to 11,000 peacekeeping soldiers and police to Chad and Central African Republic to secure their porous borders with Darfur and protect civilians and refugees.

But Chad's government has said it only wants a civil protection force of police and gendarmes.

Local community leaders at Gouroukoum camp said the government in N'Djamena was not doing enough to protect them from armed Arab raiders on horseback, known as Janjaweed, who kill and rape civilians and loot and burn their villages.

"I would like to see the blue berets arrive," one such leader, Seid Ibrahim Mustafa, said after talks with Holmes.

The displaced civilians said they wanted U.N. peacekeeping troops to act as a barrier against the raids.

"If the Chadian government refuses to send a force we will be killed. It's that simple," Issa said, adding he and many others would flee to other countries if violence did not end.

INTERLOCKING CONFLICTS

Chad accuses neighbour Sudan of backing and promoting the attacks as part of a regional destabilisation strategy aimed at expanding its brand of Islamic rule into black Africa.

Khartoum denies this but is refusing to allow the U.N to deploy peacekeeping soldiers in Darfur.

Holmes, who had also visited Sudan, said political solutions to the interlocking conflicts in Darfur and Chad were essential to halt the bloodshed there.

"If a force could be put in place ... this is a good thing, but to have a force which is effective there must be a peace to maintain. This is a little bit missing on both sides of the border," he said.

The displaced villagers at the camp said they did not feel safe even there.

Gesturing towards the barren mountains which surround the valley, a man who only gave his first name, Ismail, said: "The Janjaweed are raping women, just a few kilometres (miles) away on the other side of the mountains".

Local leaders said that while non-Arab communities had suffered the brunt of Janjaweed attacks, Chadian Arabs were also fleeing persecution because people suspected them of collaborating with the raids.

"It's a complicated conflict," Holmes said.

He said the Chadian government ought to be doing more to protect the civilians and refugees in the east.

"It should be the government that provides the security but the reality is that they can't and they aren't," Holmes said. (Editing by Pascal Fletcher and Matthew Jones; Dakar Newsroom +221 864 5076))

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