U.N. Cites Deadly Clashes In E. Chad, Near Darfur

A Chadian woman sits with her children at a camp after fleeing an attack. The U.N. said as many as nine villages were looted in recent ethnic violence. (By Marco Di Lauro -- Getty Images)

NAIROBI, Nov. 9 -- Ethnic clashes in eastern Chad near the Darfur region of Sudan may have left as many as 200 people dead and nine villages looted, the U.N. refugee agency reported Thursday.

The agency, known as the UNHCR, sent a team to Chad to investigate reports that armed men on horseback attacked, looted and burned the villages. Similar atrocities have been reported in Darfur, where tension has been heightened by a three-year insurgency.

UNHCR quoted residents in the region as saying the fighting started Saturday. Chad's government spokesman, Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor, in a statement late Tuesday referred to what appears to be the same unrest but said only that it had left "numerous victims."

That followed a report from Chadian officials who said a small clash between ethnic Arabs and ethnic Africans in another eastern region escalated into a large-scale attack in which Arabs killed 128 Africans on Oct. 31. Chadian officials say Darfur's ethnic violence is spilling across the border.

UNHCR worker Helene Caux, who on Wednesday and Thursday toured villages affected by the latest violence, said that while the tactics and ethnic element mirrored the violence in Darfur, the attackers and victims were all Chadians.

"The Chad-Sudan border is a very volatile area, and what happens in Darfur impacts on eastern Chad," Caux said by telephone from eastern Chad.

The U.N. high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, appealed for urgent action.

"We are deeply alarmed at the brutality in eastern Chad, which is already struggling to cope with more than 218,000 Sudanese refugees from neighboring Darfur," Guterres said in a statement released in Geneva. "We have warned for months that the Darfur conflict threatens to destabilize the entire region, and we support calls for an international presence in eastern Chad."

Arabs, among them slave traders, first reached sub-Saharan Africa more than a century ago. Intermarriage and the embrace of Islam by many Africans have blurred identities, but an Arab-African divide persists. It is exacerbated by a lack of resources in the region, pitting communities against one another in a competition for water and land.

In Darfur, ethnic African tribes accusing the central government of neglect launched a rebellion three years ago, following years of low-level clashes. The government is accused of responding by unleashing an Arab militia, called the Janjaweed, which has been linked to atrocities. As many as 450,000 people have died and 2.5 million have been displaced since fighting began in Darfur in early 2003.