More than 30,000 people in northern Cameroon have fled to Chad after ethnic clashes erupted this weekend, claiming at least 22 lives, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said on Friday.
Violence broke out in the border village of Ouloumsa on Sunday last week in a dispute between herders, fishers and farmers over dwindling water resources, the refugee agency said in a statement issued from Geneva, Switzerland.
It then spread to neighboring villages, 10 of which have been burned to the ground, the UNHCR said.
Photo: AFP
The clashes have displaced thousands inside Cameroon, “forcing more than 30,000 people to flee to neighboring Chad,” it said. “At least 22 people have been killed and 30 others seriously injured during several days of ongoing fighting.”
The violence was centered in Logone-et-Chari Department in Cameroon’s Far North Region — the tongue of land that lies between Nigeria to the west and Chad to the east.
The UN figures for those seeking refuge and the death toll are far higher than numbers given earlier by other sources.
The Chadian Red Cross on Thursday said that there were at least 3,000 refugees, although the number was likely to grow, while the Cameroonian authorities said at least four had died.
Eighty percent of the new arrivals are women, including many who are pregnant, and children, the UNHCR said.
They have found refuge in the Chadian capital, N’Djamena, and villages along Chad’s bank of the Logone River.
The UNHCR said that at least 10,000 have fled to N’Djamena from Kousseri, a town of 200,000 people whose cattle market was destroyed in the fighting.
“We have been sleeping on the ground with my children for two days. We are going to turn back to Kousseri because since this morning, we have only had pieces of bread to eat,” a 25-year-old mother of four told Agence France-Presse (AFP).
“We have been through terrible things,” she added, holding an infant.
“They killed my seven brothers and my father,” said Khadidja Mahamat, another recent refugee. “The assailants don’t distinguish between men and women. We are not going to leave until we see peace restored.”
Cameroonian officials say that two of the parties in the conflict are fishers of the Musgum community and ethnic Arab Choa herders.
Several thousand people have fled into the forest of Farcha, on the edge of N’Djamena, bringing with them mattresses and other possessions, an AFP reporter saw.
“What we witnessed was awful,” Rahma Ahmat, a 55-year-old refugee, said on Thursday. “I saw someone who was burned — I was terrified.”
A bout of violence between herders and fishers in August led to 45 deaths and an influx of at least 10,000 people into Chad.
As in the latest incident, the fighting began over management and access to water, the Cameroonian authorities say.
The UNHCR said that friction in the region had been exacerbated by “the climate crisis.”
“In recent decades, the surface of Lake Chad — of which the Logone River is a main tributary — has decreased by as much as 95 percent,” it said. “Fishermen and farmers have dug vast trenches to retain the remaining river water so they can fish and cultivate crops, but the muddy trenches are trapping and sometimes killing cattle belonging to the herders, sparking tension and fighting.”
Chad, a country of about 17 million inhabitants, shelters about 1 million refugees or internally displaced people.
Cameroon hosts more than 1.5 million refugees, many of them sheltering from militant violence in Nigeria.
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