Aid
agencies in Chad have called a two-day aid stoppage in protest at the
murder of a French aid worker in eastern Chad on 1 May.
“The
humanitarian community has… decided to recommend the suspension of all
humanitarian activities, except for essential services, in all of the
country on Friday 2 May and Saturday 3 May 2008,” the UN’s humanitarian
coordinator in Chad Kingsley Amaning said in a statement on 1 May.
Issued
hours after a British non-government organisation Save the Children
confirmed that its project director in Chad, Pascal Marlinge, had been
shot dead by unidentified men at a roadblock in eastern Chad, Amaning’s
statement said the two days would be used to “sensitise” aid workers,
beneficiaries and the authorities.
“[The stoppage] is a
message to the Chadian government and the parties involved in the
perpetration of this crime that in the end the people who did this are
not doing anybody any favours,” said Annette Rehrl, spokesperson for
the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Chad.
UNHCR has not stopped
work, Rehrl noted, but several of its NGO partners have. “Aid will
continue,” she pledged. “We will definitely not stop our interventions
or stop providing assistance.”
Aid agencies working in Chad
have been warning for months that the conditions are so dangerous that
aid operations for around 250,000 Sudanese refugees from Darfur and
over 100,000 displaced Chadians are constantly threatened.
Another
British NGO, Oxfam, in April temporarily suspended its operations
around Goz Beida in southeastern Chad after armed men looted its office
and the next day in a separate incident one of its cars was hijacked.
In
June 2007, Oxfam said in a statement that it had calculated at least 70
aid agency vehicles had been hijacked in eastern Chad over the two
previous years.
One of the most serious previous attacks on an
international aid worker happened in May 2006 when a UN Children’s Fund
(UNICEF) official was shot during a carjacking in the centre of the aid
hub Abeche.
“Nobody was ever prosecuted for that or brought up on charges,” said UNICEF spokesperson Cifora Monier.
The
UN and European Union have started deploying troops in eastern Chad
with a one-year mandate to protect the 12 refugee camps scattered
around the vast, desert region.
“Once they are fully deployed we will see if it makes a difference but it’s too soon to say for now,” said UNHCR’s Rehrl.