Thousands of Boko Haram refugees stranded in Chad - UN

The United Nations has said that thousands of Nigerians who escaped attacks by Boko Haram are stuck on some of the countless little islands that dot Lake Chad and are in dire need of food, water, shelter and medical care.

 

The UN also said it is “planning for the arrival (in Chad) of as many as 30,000 Nigerian refugees over the coming months” amid uncertain hope that the crisis would not worsen.

“Unless these refugees can be located and moved to an established refugee camp at Baga-Sola, 70 kilometres from the Nigerian border, they are going to remain extremely vulnerable where they are,” head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in Chad, Alice Armanni Sequi, was quoted in a report by UN’s news agency, Integrated Regional Information Networks (IRIN).

“Many of the islands are little more than swampy marshes or sandbars. While some are inhabited, their residents have little to offer the refugees except their homes: Chad’s Lake Region is one of the poorest parts of one of the poorest and least developed countries in the world. In some communities, the recent influx has more than doubled the population,” the report said.

“The current situation is quite complex. Many of the refugees have settled in places where we cannot provide them with any support, even though we desperately want to,” the deputy representative for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Chad, Mamadou Dian Balde, said, explaining that some of the islands are at least a day’s motorboat ride from the shore.

...NigerianTribune