Refugees fleeing fighting in Sudan say government forces are attacking them to get information on rebels. Some of the 25,000 refugees who fled the conflict two weeks ago told the BBC that militiamen and government forces drove them from their homes. The BBC's Grant Ferrett in Chad's capital Ndjamena says the testimonies flatly contradict the Sudanese government announcement earlier this month that peace and security had been restored after a year of fighting.

All over Cameroon, dark clouds are giving way to blue skies. But while the rains are ending, consumers are increasingly worried about their electricity supply and the anticipation of blackouts is a long way from becoming history. In the last three years, power supply has been very erratic. In this connection, the privatised utility, AES-SONEL, is talking-up prospects of investments that are afoot to turnaround the state of events. And amid the uncertainty, Sino-Cameroon relations are taking a twist towards dams. The head of state, Paul Biya, in September flew home with a baggage of dams ready for Chinese financing. These include the construction of three mini-hydropower plants by China International Water and Electrical Corporation (CWE) on the rivers Ntem, Nja, and Kadey. However, beyond government's interest in dams lies a minefield of equity and sustainability issues. Who are the actors and what are their true motives? Are their interests aligned with sustainable development?

The privatisation of electricity provides a background to comprehending some equity issues surrounding the proposed projects. The process, masterminded by the World Bank, was dispossessed of public scrutiny and participation. The recommendations of the International Finance Corporation's consultant - the private sector arm of the World Bank - blueprinted the privatisation of the National Electricity Co-operation (SONEL) in 2001. In the recommendations that were fleshed into a concession agreement, the construction of a big dam over the river Lom-Pangar was mandated to AES SIRROCO: a US based corporation. However, the Lom-Pangar issue predates privatisation. The French - enamoured by the project in 1990 - contracted the consultancy Coyne et Bellier, to carry out a feasibility study on the dam. The study was motivated by the relation between a quasi-owned French company, Alucam and SONEL. Alucam's intent to double its aluminium production capacity depended on cheap hydropower.

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Oil is bringing big changes to Chad, some cultural, others ambitious and practical, like the way the World Bank has staked its reputation on making sure that Chad manages its new wealth prudently. For Chad, among the poorest countries on earth, is now Africa's newest petrostate. Its $3.7 billion underground pipeline, stretching about 1,080 kilometres, or 670 miles, began ferrying crude through the forests of neighbouring Cameroon and to the Atlantic coast last year. It is the largest single private investment in Africa.

Aid workers have begun evacuating thousands of Sudanese refugees from the embattled Chadian border town of Tine despite blinding sandstorms and strong winds. The first convoy of 147 refugees in 33 families left Tine on Saturday for the transit centre of Touloum, 80 km inland. On Sunday, 225 refugees in 64 families joined the convoy to the facility, where the arrivals received a 15-day food ration from the World Food Programme and mats, blankets, jerry cans and soap from the UN refugee agency. "The first movement took place in very difficult weather," reported Yvan Sturm, head of UNHCR’s emergency team in the region. Visibility was zero in the midst of sandstorms and strong winds, Sturm said, upsetting plans to transport a larger number of refugees.

Driving through the arid dustbowl around Birak in eastern Chad, just a few kilometres from the western border of war-torn Sudan, you could easily miss the influxes of refugees. Hidden away from the naked eye, only local people can point to where the thousands are gathering in scattered groups. Spread out across 600 km of desiccated desert, protected only by trees and bush, and foraging to survive in the scrub, are up to 135,000 people from the Darfur region of western Sudan. Hidden from the outside world, and extremely hard to find for aid workers trying to assist them, refugees in Kourbileke (about 2 km from the border) told IRIN they had fled for their lives from Sudanese bombs on 16 January.

United Nations refugee agency staff and their counterparts from Chad have finished registering almost 5,000 Sudanese refugees in and around the border town of Tine ahead of their urgent relocation to safer positions further inside Chad. A spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said the agency wants to move the refugees as quickly as possible after several bombs exploded near Tine last Thursday.

Sudanese government forces bombed the Chadian side of the border town of Tine last week, killing two people as they fought rebels for control of the Sudanese half of the city, News24.com reported. According to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, seven explosions rocked an area close to where Sudanese refugees had been gathering. The blasts killed a man and his daughter and left 15 others injured.

A further 18,000 Sudanese refugees flooded into eastern Chad over the past week following continued heavy fighting in Sudan's western Darfur region. This brings the number of refugees flowing into Chad to over 110,000 since two rebel groups seeking autonomy for Darfur launched a guerrilla war against the Sudanese government early last year. In addition, the UN estimates that over 600,000 have been internally displaced within Darfur.

An outbreak of cholera killed 11 people in southern Chad earlier this month, but the outbreak has been brought under control following repairs to the water supply system in the town of Moundou, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said last Thursday. Dr Abdoulaye Yam, the leader of a WHO team which investigated an outbreak of acute diarrhoea in Moundou, an industrial town 600 km south of the capital N'Djamena, said the disease had been confirmed as cholera.

The UN refugee agency has dispatched teams to the border region of Chad to look into reports of some 18,000 new Sudanese refugees fleeing continued violence in western Sudan's Darfur region over the past five days. Local authorities in the border area north of the town of Adre in eastern Chad told a UNHCR team there Tuesday that some 8,000 refugees had arrived in three different sites. The new arrivals had reportedly fled from fighting in Sudan's Djerbira canton since January 16.

Hundreds of Sudanese refugees fleeing fighting in the Darfur region have been relocated away from the volatile Chad-Sudan border to a safer site in eastern Chad. On Monday, a second convoy of some 240 people left Ouendalou border site for the new camp at Farchana, 55 km away. They joined the first group of 148 people who had left on Saturday.

At least nine people have died from an outbreak of acute gastro-enteritis in Moundou, the main town in southern Chad, following the breakdown of its water works which has led people to drink polluted water from wells and the local river, the Ministry of Health said in a statement. The ministry said 90 people had fallen ill with acute diarrhoea and vomiting since the town's main water pumping station broke down in late December.

An emergency team from the UN refugee agency visiting the Chad-Sudan border has heard reports of killing and looting in western Sudan, and witnessed poor living conditions for thousands of Sudanese refugees in Chad. On 8 January 2004, the UNHCR team concluded a two-day mission to the north-eastern Birak area, where they visited the site of Djoran, 15 km from the Sudanese border. They found thousands of refugees (estimates range from 4,000 to 8,000) living in precarious conditions after fleeing western Sudan's Darfur region.

The government of Chad signed a fresh peace agreement on Sunday with the rebel Movement for Democracy and Justice in Chad (MDJT), which has been fighting a low-level guerrilla war against President Idriss Deby in the desert north of the country since 1998. The deal was signed in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso, by Chad's Minister for Security and Immigration, Aduramane Moussa, and General Adoum Togoi Abbo, the chairman of the MDJT.

A human rights association, The Ligue Centrafricaine des Droits de l’Homme [LCDH], has asked the transitional government of Francois Bozize to repatriate armed Chadian forces, whom it described as mercenaries, over their alleged involvement in human rights abuses in the capital, Bangui. The group claim that the Chadian "mercenaries", who supported Bozize in his six-month rebellion against former President Ange-Felix Patasse, were responsible for human right abuses and insecurity prevailing in the country.

Nearly 10,000 more Sudanese refugees have fled to eastern Chad to escape an escalation of conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan, bringing total numbers to more than 75,000. Meanwhile, safety concerns have led the UN refugee agency to start developing a site further inland in Chad to relocate the refugees who have been living in sites along the volatile border.

Chad has begun to export oil to the United States, but this desperately poor African country remains incapable of producing electricity to meet its own power needs. Just two percent of the landlocked country's eight million people have access to the electricity produced irregularly by an ancient rundown power station in the capital, N'Djamena.

The UN refugee agency is stepping up efforts to identify suitable locations to transfer more than 65,000 Sudanese refugees living along the Chad-Sudan border amid growing concerns that a ceasefire period on the Sudanese side is ending.

Chad, one of the world's poorest countries, joined the ranks of oil producers this week with the inauguration of a $3.7bn (?3.2bn, £2.2bn) project tied to a pioneering scheme for tracking how oil money is spent.

Souleymane Guengueng, a torture victim and award-winning human rights activist from Chad, has been fired from his position with the World Bank-backed Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC), Human Rights Watch says. The Commission apparently took the measure in reprisal for his campaign to bring to justice the former dictator of Chad, Hissene Habre.