July 11, 2007	Wednesday	Jamadi-us-Sani 25, 1428

HABILE (Chad): Mahamat stares out from beneath his mother’s shawl, his eyes glassy and bewildered.

His shoulder bones protrude painfully from his tiny frame, while wisps of orange hair cover his over-sized head.

He’s only two years old, but he has the haunted look of an old man.

Some aid workers say malnourishment and mortality are reaching alarming levels in the children among 170,000 Chadian civilians displaced by violence that has ravaged the east of their country, which borders with Sudan’s conflict-torn Darfur.

Some like Mahamat are so ill with malnutrition they need round-the-clock hospital care.

“The situation in the displaced camps in eastern Chad is way above emergency thresholds,” said Johanne Sekkenes, field coordinator for French medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in the village of Kou Kou.

The Chadians have been forced from their homes by successive overlapping violence — cross-border raids from Darfur by Arab Janjaweed militias, inter-ethnic clashes between Arab and non-Arab communities and advances by Chadian rebels.

Along with tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees also sheltering in this barren terrain, almost half a million people in eastern Chad are reliant on international help to survive.

Since last month, the race has been on to get aid into this region before the rains start in the coming weeks, which will make roads impassable.

On the orders of France’s new foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, French military planes have been airlifting in food supplies. Aid groups are rushing to give families plastic sheeting to protect their flimsy straw shelters.

But for many, the relief operation is too little, too late.

“The international aid is very late, and the closer we get to the rainy season the more difficult it’s going to be,” MSF’s Sekkenes told the news agency.

“We’re trying to catch up ... but there’s more aid needed and it has to be stepped up quickly,” she added.

“CRYING WITH HUNGER”: There is good reason for alarm. A recent MSF survey among the displaced showed that out of 1,000 children under five, some 400 were acutely malnourished.

MSF opened their latest malnutrition clinic two weeks ago in the Habile camp for the displaced Chadians.

The worst cases, like Mahamat, are admitted to a makeshift white tent which serves as a field hospital for 24-hour care.

One infant who was taken in died within an hour.

A few kilometres away in Koubigou camp, home to 3,000 new arrivals, Hawai Issa rubs one stone against another, crushing grains of millet to make a thin, watery porridge.

In the four weeks since Hawai and her nine children arrived here, this is all they have eaten, day in, day out.

“Sometimes we earn money by washing people’s clothes, but the days we don’t find work, our children go hungry,” said Hawai, who fled her home eight months ago.

“They cry all night long with hunger. We used to be strong but now you can see we are thin because there’s nothing to eat.

We’ve become used to this feeling of hunger now.”

Hawai says she has received food assistance only once.

“The Janjaweed left us with no clothes and nothing to eat. What can we do?” she said.

With so many reliant on aid, it’s inevitable that some families fall through the net as they wait their turn for help.

“There is a massive need — we must provide everything for these people from food to water and shelter, but resources are extremely scarce,” Luc Brandt of the UN refugee agency UNHCR told the news group inside Koubigou camp.

He said the camps were like small cities with 10,000 to 20,000 people living here.—Reuters