Refugees and Legionnaires
By Lane Wallace
February 2008
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The first sign that I’ve left modern civilization—and whatever thin veneer of order might accompany it—appears as I try to exit baggage claim and customs at the international airport in N’Djamena, Chad. I walk through the customs doorway into the terminal lobby and suddenly find myself in a real-life variation of the jail scene in Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean ride. Except that the pressing, noisy crowd of people whose arms are draped around and reaching through the bars are wearing flowing white djellabahs and turbans instead of pirate garb. And I’m the one inside the cage.
As I make my way toward the armed soldier who guards the jail-cell door to the barred enclosure, I wonder whether the structure is meant to keep arriving passengers from bolting out, or the crowds of locals from bolting in. Either way, it doesn’t seem like a good sign. The soldier opens the door a crack for me, yelling and pushing the crowd back while I slip through the gap and, using my best New Yorker-at-rush-hour skills, put my head down and maneuver my way firmly through the phalanx of bodies to get to the open air beyond.
“You’re going to CHAD? WHY?” my college roommate—who lives in Zambia, mind you—said in astonishment when I told her it was a possible stop on my Africa trip. Standing in the crowded, chaotic airport terminal, I’m beginning to ask myself the same question. But I didn’t come here for an easy or comfortable experience. I came, quite simply, because there’s important flying being done here.
The Sudanese disaster zone known as Darfur didn’t stay contained in Sudan for long. By early 2004, refugees had spilled across the border into Chad, and the violence followed soon after. The reasons are complex. All parties to the conflict are Muslim, so it’s not about religion. In both countries, the violence is part Arab versus African, part tribe versus tribe, and part government versus rebel forces—not to mention government versus government. But the end result is that there’s hardly a village left standing in eastern Chad now, and each of the official United Nations international refugee camps here is surrounded by several less-organized camps of Chadian refugees fleeing the violence within their own borders.
With very little infrastructure in the country, and (as far as I could tell) not a single paved road in the entire eastern province, airplanes offer a critical link to get people and supplies to the refugee areas—especially during the rainy season, when ground travel by anything but camel becomes virtually impossible.
That’s where an organization like Air Serv International comes in. Air Serv is a secular, nonprofit organization that was founded in 1984 to provide planes and crews for international relief organizations—especially those that needed flexible and immediate air support for disaster or conflict zones in remote areas of the world.
Within days of the December 26, 2004, tsunami in Indonesia, Air Serv was onsite with a half-dozen helicopters and crews, shuttling supplies and medical personnel from MSF (Doctors Without Borders) to remote areas. Even as Tutsis were still fleeing the genocide in Rwanda, Air Serv began flying relief personnel into the area aboard two Caravans it brought in from nearby areas. And when the violence broke out in Darfur, in early 2004, Air Serv was the first aviation group to set up a base in eastern Chad to help the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) get personnel and supplies to the camps springing up on both sides of the border.
The pilots who fly for Air Serv in Chad are based in the eastern town of Abeche—a place so remote that there’s still a fortified outpost of the French Foreign Legion there. As I step out of the plane in Abeche, I see dozens of AK-47-toting Chadian men—some in camouflage, others in flowing desert djellabahs—with turbans wrapped not only around the top of their heads, but coiled around their lower faces as well, so that all that shows are dark, hard eyes peering out of the fabric.
Substitute sabers for the AK-47 rifles, and they could be characters straight out of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Wind, Sand and Stars. But with the safety of my living room couch a million miles away, and surrounded by armed men whose eyes hold no warmth or goodwill, I suddenly begin rethinking all my romantic notions about St. Ex’s tales of adventure in the African desert.
“From the outside, it might look safe here,” acknowledges Myriam Huser, one of the Air Serv pilots in Abeche. “But it’s not safe. People here are very unpredictable. And everyone has guns. Children have guns.”
Myriam should know. She’s been in Chad longer than any other Air Serv pilot has lasted there—since March of 2006. In that time, she’s been hijacked, done medevacs of gunshot-injury patients from remote camps, been detained for five days after landing in Darfur and—along with the other Air Serv and humanitarian workers in Abeche—had to take refuge at the Foreign Legion base for four days last November when Abeche was overrun by rebel forces.
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