REFUGEE PROTECTION IN EASTERN CHAD - Part 1

UNCLAS SECTION 01 OF 04 NDJAMENA 000357 SIPDIS SIPDIS, SENSITIVE STATE FOR AF/C, PRM/AFR:MLANGE,S/CRS:PNELSON-DOUVELIS/JVANCE/ JBEIK E.O. 12958: N/A TAGS: PREF PGOV KCRS SU CD SUBJECT: REFUGEE PROTECTION IN EASTERN CHAD - Part 1 REF: NDJAMENA 257 NDJAMENA 00000357 001.2 OF 004 ¶1. (U) Summary: A team from the DepartmentQs Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration/Africa Office (PRM/AFR) and the office of the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization (S/CRS) visited Sudanese refugee camps in eastern Chad from March 20-28 to monitor USG-funded protection and assistance programs for refugees and conflict victims and to focus particularly on concerns about camp security/neutrality. This message focuses on the current status of the various elements that constitute refugee protection Q to include non-refoulement, physical security, registration/documentation, protection of women and of children, gender-based violence (GBV) prevention, and civilian character of camps. A summary of recommendations is in the last paragraph. ¶2. (U) The cornerstone of refugee protection Q first asylum is still firmly in place despite Chadian weariness with hosting refugees. Registration and documentation of refugees is progressing well but the Government of Chad (GOC) is holding up the issuance of ID cards. Physical ecurity of the camps is primarily in the hands o gendarmes whose numbers have finally been incresed by about 100 as was foreseen in a special PRM contribution to UNHCR. However, with an average four weapons per detachment of 18, the gendarmes woefully under-equipped. And they have not been paid since the beginning of 2007 as UNHCR and the GOC have been negotiating a new contract. Concerning the need to arm the gendarmes, we were informed that only President Deby has the authority to rectify their lack of weapons. Thankfully, the gendarmes have stayed on the job. Physical security of refugees inside the camps is generally not an issue; security outside the camps is, particularly as refugees seek fire- wood. Depletion of firewood in the vicinity of the camps is both an environmental and protection concern and UNHCR needs to more aggressively address the need for alternatives to traditional wood stoves. While alternatives are costly, UNHCR must level with donors that it is a pay-now-or-pay-more-later situation. ¶3. (U) Insecurity in eastern Chad requires humanitarians to travel by convoy and observe strict curfews, limiting both the number of staff and the contact hours that humanitarians have with refugees. The resulting negative impact on protecting children, maintaining the strictly civilian character of the camps, and fulfilling the High CommissionerQs five commitments to refugee women is becoming more evident. Probably the most difficult challenge to child protection in terms of girls is the custom of early marriage in a polygamous setting where the economics of survival favor the custom. The most difficult challenge with respect to boys Q as ever Q is to avoid their recruitment into fighting forces. Education (formal and informal) remains the primary point of entry for protection of refugee children. However, due to insufficient funding, standards in primary education are not being met, and refugee leaders pleaded for secondary education and other activities for youth. ¶4. (SBU) Maintaining the exclusively civilian character of the refugee camps is becoming increasingly challenging as the Darfur crisis drags on, with increased refugee frustration and hence susceptibility to recruitment, the emergence of the Chadian rebels as another factor, and increased Chadian government boldness in using/seeing the refugees used in the Chad-Sudan confrontation. Problems identified to date are recruiting, including forced recruiting, in some camps and the presence of weapons and sometimes combatants in camps. Potential camp security/neutrality risks that have NOT/NOT been clearly identified/verified to date, but to the possibility of which UNHCR and partners should be alert include diversion of supplies and food to combatants; rebel training within camp boundaries; taxing of refugees to fund arms procurement; intimidation of refugees to provide support for military activities; and use of refugee camps to shelter combatants from conflict. Routine rebel visits to family members who are in refugee camps are generally not too problematic provided that weapons are left outside of camps and no military activities are undertaken inside the camps. UNHCR continues to deliver the non- militarization message in all of it dealings with the GOC and with refugee leadership. Speaking to refugees and townspeople in Kounoungo Camp on March 25, President Deby said all of the right things about no weapons/recruitment, but the GOC commitment on enforcement does not appear to be strong. The USG and other donors should redouble efforts to press the GOC to fulfill its responsibilities. Strategies to pursue include camp relocation, empowerment of refugees to resist militarization (e.g. strengthening womenQs decision-making in the camps and providing alternative educational/ vocational activities for youth) and the fielding of a UN police-type force that would help protect the refugee camps in part by keeping rebels out. End Summary. NDJAMENA 00000357 002.2 OF 004 Introduction ¶5. (U) State Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration/Africa team of Margaret McKelvey and Geoff Parker, accompanied by S/CRS detailee to Embassy Ndjamena Charles Wintermeyer, visited Sudanese refugee camps in the areas of Bahai, Guereda, Iriba, and Farchana from March 20-28 to monitor USG-funded protection and assistance programs for refugees and conflict victims and to focus particularly on concerns about camp security/neutrality. Parker also visited the Goz Beida area refugee camps as a participant in the annual UNHCR Country Operations Planning exercise March 11-18. (Wintermeyer had also previously visited Goz Beida with USAID/OFDA TDYer Victor Bushamuka to review the situation of internally displaced Chadians.) This message focuses on the current status of the various elements that constitute refugee protection Q to include non-refoulement, physical security, registration/ documentation, protection of women and of children, gender-based violence (GBV) prevention, and civilian character of camps. First principle Q first asylum ¶6. (U) The cornerstone of refugee protection Q no forced repatriation and the right to seek and enjoy asylum Q is judged to be still firmly in place in Chad despite growing Chadian weariness with the presence of over 230,000 refugees from Darfur. Of potential concern, however, is the inability of UNHCR field officers in Guereda to conduct border monitoring missions to verify that all is well since late November 2006 when ethnic tensions and Chadian rebel attacks led to increased UN security restrictions on staff movements. Physical Security ¶7. (U) The camps continue to be essentially open to anyone who wants to enter despite the presence of an official entry point staffed by Chadian gendarmes. Gendarmes do patrol around, and more recently even inside, the camps. The PRM QS/CRS team observed one incident where a commercial vehicle (i.e., a pickup truck filled to overflowing with various sacks, kettles, and other items dangling) was being unloaded for inspection by the gendarmes after having been apprehended in the camp without authorization. ¶8. (SBU) With the exception of Kounoungo Camp, physical security of refugees inside the camps is not currently a great concern. Kounoungo presents a special case as non-integrated/ non-reconciled Chadian rebel members of the FUC (United Front for Change) have entered the camp via their association with some Chadian Tama who managed to fraudulently register as refugees. These FUC personnel have been the perpetrators of several attacks on Zaghawa refugees (see reftel). ¶9. (U) Obviously, the physical security of refugees outside of the camps, notably of refugee women/girls going to collect firewood and/or tend to animals, is an ongoing concern. This threat stems primarily from the conflict with the local population over natural resources. In some cases, gendarmes accompany those who go on the UNHCR-organized collection of firewood. ¶10. (U) The firewood issue is both an environmental as well as a protection issue. UNHCR has attempted to address the issue by distributing and promoting the use of the QSave 80Q fuel efficient stove that is supposed to use only some 20% of the firewood consumed by traditional cooking methods. The stoves are also safer and at Breidjing Camp, refugee women leaders reported that they had banished families that refused to use the new stoves to the outskirts of the camp in order to minimize the danger of fire. But financial considerations are limiting the number of stoves that UNHCR can distribute so only the largest families have received stoves so far. Moreover, since UNHCR-provided firewood represents only about 30% of what refugees need, the use of the stoves will not necessarily result in a dramatic cost savings or an immediate answer to the essential depletion of firewood in the vicinity of camps. For the Guereda camps, in 2005 gendarmes accompanied women up to 20 kilometers outside the camps to collect firewood; now in 2007, they must go 80 kms to find sufficient wood. Clearly a fuel crunch point is coming more quickly than it would appear a solution to the Darfur crisis is coming. UNHCR worries that trying to introduce alternative cooking methods such as kerosene and/or rapid distribution of QSave 80Q stoves to every refugee family would be prohibitively costly. But not coming to grips with the impending firewood crisis could engender even greater costs in the not too distant future. Unfortunately, solar power has not NDJAMENA 00000357 003.2 OF 004 been a successful alternative in the camps owing to the dust and/or to the length of time required to cook food. Recommendation: The PRM team urged UNHCR at the Abeche and Ndjamena levels to address the firewood depletion issue much more aggressively from a business-minded perspective of pay now or pay more later. Pressure to follow up and to explain the financial equirements to donors sould continue.] ¶11. (BU) The long-awaited increase of the Chadian gendrme force (with funding from State/PRM to UNHCR)is reported by UNHCR Security Officers to finall be in place with the addition of six patrols of fifteen gendarmes each (located in the five Field Offices in the east Q Bahai, Iriba, Guereda, Farchana, and Goz Beida -- and in Abeche) along with five liaison officers and three coordinators. Along with the 18 gendarmes stationed in each of the twelve camps in the east and the 16 gendarmes spread across the southern camps, there should be a total of some 330. Whether all of the assigned gendarmes are in place at any given time is another issue. Despite an earlier expectation that gendarmes would rotate among camps, most of those to whom the PRM QS/CRS team spoke had been in place since 2004. A critical concern with respect to the gendarmes is their lack of weaponry to accomplish their protection/law and order mission. In at least some camps, there is not an arm for each gendarme (leading to the wry moniker of Qgens sans armesQ). Apparently only President Deby himself can order that arms be given to gendarmes; at least at Kounoungou Camp (reftel) the gendarmes had an opportunity to inform Deby of their lack of weapons. Recommendation: Protecting our current investment in the gendarme force, ensuring that gendarmes charged with protecting refugees/camps and humanitarian operations have adequate weaponry to discharge their duties should be part of the bilateral USG-Chadian dialogue. ¶12. (SBU) Another issue with respect to the effectiveness of the gendarmes is the fact that none had been paid since the beginning of 2007 owing first to delays in signing the annual UNHCR-GOC memorandum of understanding on the gendarmes because of UNHCR reluctance to pay increased costs (which UNHCR feared would go not to the gendarmes but into the pockets of GOC officials) and second to delays in the movement of funds from UNHCR to GOC accounts. Perhaps remarkably, the gendarmes have stayed on the job while running up IOUs with local merchants for food and other necessities. UNHCR planned to give some direct payments to the gendarmes so as not to prolong the delay in providing stipends into April. Recommendation: Embassy/Ndjamena should track the stipend issue to ensure that it is resolved favorably and that gendarmes are paid as quickly as possible. ¶13. (U) Physical security of humanitarian workers themselves is also a factor in whether they can provide the requisite protection for refugees. Targeted for their vehicles, radios, and money, humanitarians have been traveling in convoys under gendarme escort since the Chadian rebel assault on Ndjamena in April 2006. This diminishes the number of contact hours that humanitarians have with refugees and takes gendarmes away from their primary camp protection role. Even if Eastern Chad were to be re-designated as Qphase 3Q security vice Qphase 4Q, as some such as new OCHA coordinator Daniel Augstberger have suggested would be appropriate, the need for security escorts would not likely diminish. Going from four to three could be very helpful, however, in terms of increasing the number of humanitarian staff allowed in the field. Registration/Documentation ¶14. (U) All of the current camp populations are registered in UNHCRQs ProGress system. In Oure Cassoni and Am Nabak Camps, however, the individual pictures to go along with the data entries have not yet been taken. Each married female is registered along with her children as a family unit while the men are registered separately with their various wives cross referenced. While refugees do have their individual copies of the ProGress registration, they do not yet have individual identification cards that UNHCR funded owing to the GOCQs indecision on authorizing their issuance. Babies, whether born in a camp health facility or at home, are given birth certificates using a Chadian double coupon system; the mother receives one copy which could eventually be used to seek Chadian nationality for a child that might want it. In Briedjing, the PRM team saw relatively new babies having their pictures taken to be added to the familyQs ProGress file. Recommendation: The USG should weigh in with the GOC (in consultation with UNHCR) in getting the individual ID cards distributed as soon as possible. Child Protection NDJAMENA 00000357 004.2 OF 004 ¶15. (U) As with many activities in the community services area, insecurity that limits humanitarian contact hours with the refugee communities also hinders full implementation of child protection measures. Christian ChildrenQs Fund, for example, withdrew from Kounoungou and Mile Camps following multiple Guereda security incidents and is behind schedule in implementing PRM-funded efforts in Touloum and Iridimi Camps. ¶16. (U) Tripoli minimize considered. TAMLYN