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A REGION IN DISARRAY
Adré, a Chadian town almost next to the Sudanese border, is today the focus of a crisis that is bigger than it. Because of the lack of transport infrastructure, this territory in the far east of Chad has few links with the rest of the country, particularly with the capital N ' Djaména to the west. Long, bumpy, ochre-coloured dirt tracks through untouched sub-Saharan biodiversity are the only way to reach this region.
On 15 April 2023, a violent conflict erupted in Sudan between the Sudanese Armed Forces( SAF) and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces( RSF), more specifically in the capital Khartoum and the Darfur region. On one side, the SAF, commanded by General Abdel Fattah al- Burhan, Sudan ' s de facto leader since the October 2021 military coup and on the other side the RSF, a powerful paramilitary organisation formed in 2013 from the Janjaweed militia networks that had fought in Darfurand and is led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, widely known as Hemedti.
" It ' s a conflict that I don ' t think all the players saw coming, or at least its resurgence in this new form. The attention of the humanitarian community in the region was more focused on the clashes in the central Sahel and the fight against Boko Haram," admits Xavier Creach, Deputy Regional Director of the Office of the United " For me, this conflict is above all characterised by an extraordinary level of human rights violations. There is a lot of talk about the war, about the different armed groups or factions that are fighting each other... But we don ' t talk enough about the civilian victims and we don ' t talk enough about the systematic violence against certain minorities and the atrocity of the crimes committed. After 29 years with the UNHCR, I can ' t get used to these human tragedies, to the women who tell how they saw their husbands and children burnt alive in their homes, to the rapes, to the attacks on civilians trying to flee."
CAMPS THE SIZE OF CONURBATIONS
" This is the Adré camp, which is attracting the world ' s attention,’ says Sebastien Arrivé, looking out over a landscape of makeshift barracks made of twigs and worn canvas stretching as far as the eye can see. More than 280,000 people have spontaneously settled on this site which, under international law, is not a camp as such, just a transit point. This means that there is no long-term investment or commitment on the part of the authorities as there is in the other camps.
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