U.S. and European Media

July 10, 2023

Reuters: Hunger stalks displaced civilians in eastern Chad. Mahamat stares out from beneath his mother's shawl, his eyes glassy and bewildered. His shoulder bones protrude painfully from his tiny frame, while wisps of orange hair cover his over-sized head. He's only 2-years-old, but he has the haunted look of an old man. Some aid workers say malnourishment and mortality are reaching alarming levels in the children among 170,000 Chadian civilians displaced by violence that has ravaged the east of their country, which borders with Sudan's conflict-torn Darfur. "The situation in the displaced camps in eastern Chad is way above emergency thresholds," said Johanne Sekkenes, field coordinator for French medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in the village of Kou Kou. The Chadians have been forced from their homes by successive overlapping violence -- cross-border raids from Darfur by Arab Janjaweed militias, inter-ethnic clashes between Arab and non-Arab communities and advances by Chadian rebels. Since last month, the race has been on to get aid into this region before the rains start in the coming weeks, which will make roads impassable.

BBC: Arabs face discrimination in Chad. Just past a camp for displaced Chadians, past the jumble of straw huts and plastic sheeting, lies a small village called Aradib. The people of Aradib are lying low; inter-ethnic violence which swept through this region has now arrived on their own doorstep, and villagers are scared of what is in store for them. But the inhabitants here are in a peculiar position: their village is Arab. Zakaria Yacoub, the village chief of Aradib, paints a sombre picture. "When the Janjaweed started attacking last year we went to the authorities to explain we are innocent," he says. "But because we're Arabs, we were still accused of being guides for the Janjaweed." While everyone here accepts that black African groups have borne the brunt of the violence, Arabs are keen to remind outsiders that some of their villages have been attacked as well. To prove his point, Mr Yacoub takes us to a village just up the road called Goz Amir. The sight which greets us is grimly familiar: every house has been burnt to the ground, giant clay urns have been smashed and destroyed, and the inhabitants have long since fled. But Goz Amir is an Arab village, and locals say it was destroyed six months ago in a revenge attack, along with several other Arab settlements. With victims of Janjaweed attacks living alongside local Arabs, and often having to share resources such as water and land, it is perhaps not surprising that tensions are proving hard to defuse.

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