Saudi Arabia should immediately end its discrimination against its 100,000 Chadian residents, most of whom were born in the kingdom but are increasingly denied the rights to basic education and emergency healthcare, Human Rights Watch has said. Saudi Arabia's decision to target Chadian children for expulsion from school is arbitrary and discriminatory.

The Chadian parliament voted late on Wednesday to meet a demand by the country’s main union for a five percent wage hike, putting in sight an end to the strike which has closed down government offices and healthcare facilities in the capital since early June. “The ministry of finance, sharing the concerns of the finance commission and taking into account the unhealthy social environment, has agreed to a five percent wage increase, backdated to January 2005,” the parliament’s president, Nassour Guelengdouksia, said in a statement.

The Camp Community Development Coordinator's main responsibility will be to develop and oversee all IRC social services in Oure Cassoni refugee camp, with a heavy focus on the areas of protection, child and youth protection and development, and education. This position will be responsible for overseeing protection activities in the camp and for providing technical and capacity building assistance to IRC staff undertaking an initiative to mainstream protection throughout all sectors.

The poorest residents of the Chadian capital N’djamena are struggling to cope as a strike that has closed hospitals across the city enters a second month, and union and government leaders say they are still not ready to compromise. At 10 a.m. one Saturday morning in front of the emergency ward of the general hospital, not far from the N’djamena town hall, 50-year-old Saleh, a filthy bandage wrapped around his shoulder, stood slumped against a wall, groaning.

Nearly two months after the signing of a peace accord between Sudan and a rebel group in Darfur, the humanitarian situation there appears to have worsened, while Khartoum-backed Janjaweed militia continue to attack towns and villages in neighbouring Chad. Human rights groups and others are calling for urgent action by the African Union (AU) and the United Nations to prevent the violence from further destabilising the entire sub-region along Sudan's lengthy western border.

Rebels from Chad have attacked neighbouring Central African Republic (CAR), leaving an unknown number of rebels and soldiers dead, the CAR says. Peacekeepers from a regional body were also involved in the clashes with
"heavily armed" rebels in the north, the interior ministry says.

As Sudan's feared Janjaweed militia step up their cross-border attacks into Chad, there is worrying new evidence that some Chadians have joined forces with the Janjaweed to attack their own countrymen. Victims of attacks say that some Chadians are acting as "guides" to the Janjaweed, directing them to certain villages and suggesting which cattle to steal. Many victims also say that some Chadians are taking part in the actual killings.

More than 10,000 Chadians have fled to Sudan's war-torn Darfur region in the last month, the international medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres says. They have been escaping attacks reported to have been carried out by men on horseback and camels.

Chadian President Idriss Déby has instructed his government to open a dialogue with the political opposition in a government decree released to journalists. Before the May presidential elections, President Déby had opposed any democratic reforms, causing the opposition to boycott the poll.

The stench of rotting corpses becomes unbearable. Locals say 75 of their men are buried in shallow graves in this glade on the village's outskirts, killed they say by men on horses, and by their own neighbours. The bodies were hastily buried in mid-May, days after a rag-tag group of men armed with guns, spears, and machetes overran the village in a dawn attack.

The internal situation in Chad is deteriorating rapidly, and spill-over from the Darfur crisis is only part of the reason, says the International Crisis Group. "Sudan’s deliberate use of Chadian warlords in its counter-insurgency strategy in Darfur and as a tool in its attempts to topple President Idriss Déby is just one aspect of Chad’s woes. The ever deeper convergence of the two crises underlines the difficulty of settling one independently of the other," says the group.

The constitutional council confirmed Idriss Deby's victory in presidential elections early this month. Deby won a third successive five-year mandate with 64.67 percent of the vote, the council said, which although a substantial majority, was below the provisional victory figure of 77.6 percent initially released by the country's national election commission.

Internews Network, an international media development NGO, is seeking an expert on violence against women/post conflict trauma to work with residents of the Darfur refugee camps. The advisor will first conduct a needs assessment and then develop radio programming to address the specific needs of women.

IRC currently seeks a Gender Based Violence Program Manager.

In four major refugee camps less than 40 kilometres north of Bekoningka, the southern Chadian border village, basic shelter and protection is provided to 48,000 CAR refugees by the UN's refugee agency UNHCR. But new arrivals have been told by the local authorities that they must wait to be registered at Bekoningka before they can move to the camps. Life for the squatters is hard, even by local standards, in a region where few can afford even the basics, and low prices for cotton, the region's main crop, has devastated incomes this year.

Rebel groups are reportedly continuing to recruit men and boys in camps in Chad that shelter 200,000 Sudanese who have fled the fighting in the Darfur region of their own country, and the Chadian Government must take all necessary steps to stop such activities, according to the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR). "People who have fled the horrors of Darfur have already suffered enough," UNHCR spokesman told a news briefing in Geneva. "It is totally unacceptable that refugee camps become recruiting grounds and that children under the age of 18 are being victimized."

The UN’s humanitarian point-man, Jan Egeland, warned that a UN operation to assist quarter of a million people who fled to eastern Chad to escape fighting has only received a tiny fraction of the funds needed. Most of those in need of help ran from brutal terror campaigns in the Darfur region of neighbouring Sudan. Others are displaced by fighting in Chad or are refugees from war over the border in Central African Republic.

Opposition parties that boycotted last week’s presidential election in Chad said that they will not recognise the victor regardless of who wins in the final tally. Polling went ahead across Chad on 3 May despite international and opposition pressure for a delay, after rebels threatened to repeat attacks on the capital N’djamena in a bid to disrupt voting.

Four months ago, World Bank President Paul Wolfowitz was fuming at the African nation of Chad for diverting oil revenues from the Chad-Cameron pipeline slated for poverty alleviation and social spending to a budget allocation for arms purchases. But now the former number two at the US Defence Department has decided that Chad, which threatened to halt its oil exports if the World Bank continued its aggressive posture, was not so wayward after all.

Voting has ended in Chad's presidential election, in which President Idriss Deby is seeking a third term in office. Opposition parties boycotted the poll and voter turnout was reported to be extremely low. Rebel groups did not carry out threats to disrupt voting, the BBC's Stephanie Hancock in the Chadian capital, N'Djamena, reports. However, the country remains divided, with serious security concerns dominating the election. Mr Deby faced four challengers, but the poll was controversial since the main opposition party had refused to put forward candidates. Results will not be known for another ten days, but everyone in Chad is certain that President Deby will win, our correspondent says.
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Idriss Deby, a President Under Siege