An unshakable sense of precariousness greets the visitor to east Chad. It is a sense quickly magnified by an obvious shortage of food, and bursts of gunfire at night.
Initially, though, it is a sense prompted by the region’s remoteness. From Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, the Sudanese border is four UN flights away, the plane bouncing between airports where the terminal is a single shipping container.
There are no actual roads. On maps a scratchy line suggests that one stretches west from the border town of Adré. In reality it is a track in the sand, its contours forever shifting in the wind. Barely navigable in the blistering dry season, surely it is impossible in the impending rains. From Adré to the town of Farchana – a 20-mile drive that takes 80 minutes with a gung-ho driver – the track plunges across seven chasmic wadis.
It is a route challenging for other reasons: “bandits” target convoys, trucks belonging to aid agencies are taken at gunpoint. No humanitarian operation is now allowed to travel without a heavily armed escort. One UN convoy I joined during a recent trip to report for the Guardian was spearheaded by a couple of jeeps crammed with gunmen.
Night falls quickly in Chad. At 5pm our driver would get twitchy: no one wants to be on the road after sundown.
Often conflict zones are demarcated by manmade defences or geographical barriers, such as an ocean. In Chad it is a shallow dip in the desert.
That dip marks a slim – unofficial – swathe of no man’s land at the border. Five metres away, wobbling in the 44C heat, stands Darfur. Groups of camouflaged Rapid Support Forces (RSF) stare at us but we are told to avoid eye contact. Don’t even think about a photo.
The RSF has embarked on repeated ethnic rampages in Darfur, raping untold women. Every day a line of women and children traipses into Chad, each with a tale that seems to redefine brutality. But also bravery. Each was determined not to be flattened by the horrors they had survived.
Faced with such resolve, my own petty concerns dissolve long before I leave east Chad. Instead, I wonder, what might happen if our world leaders ever had the chance to meet such people.
Mark Townsend, senior reporter, Global development
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