There are rumours of war, of genocide, of ethnic cleansing; they are whispered on the gritty, boiling wind that blows across the border from Sudan. In ones and twos and tens and hundreds, refugees struggle into Chad with stories of systematic murder, rape, slavery and scorched earth. I've been down this mine-sown track before: five years ago I covered the man-made famine that was an attrition against the Dinka in the south. That 20-year conflict has finally been settled with a peace deal brokered by the Americans and paid for by oil; now the murderous bullying has moved up into the large western province of Darfur, where the irregular bandit cavalry, the Janjaweed, are wiping out black farming communities. The Arab-Islamic government of Khartoum denies any culpability and says with a shrug that this is a little local conflict between farmers and nomadic herdsmen.
Meanwhile, the UN steeples its fingers, sucks its teeth and equivocates, hinting that perhaps maybe this might be the worst humanitarian crisis in the world at the moment. Maybe perhaps 100,000 people are dead, and perhaps maybe a million more are on the pending list, waiting to get across the border before the rains come.
Our own UN security council and the G8 have decided they don't have any immediate plans to intervene in Darfur, so the voiceless and unheeded continue to stagger through the desert into Chad, a diplomatically dumb country spectacularly unprepared for guests. The accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide hang in the air, but few with the power to do anything about them want to say the words on record. It's like casting a spell to summon the apocalypse. Once said out loud, the world is a step closer to having to confront another Rwanda, another Kosovo. But there is a selective deafness abroad brought about by conflict in the Middle East, Iraq and the constant sirens of global terrorism, and unstated but ever present is the real-world wisdom that this, after all, is just another Africa story from the continent that brought you all the defining examples of horror; where the usual calibrations of misery don't apply.
I have no doubt there are dozens of marvellous and edifying things about Chad: being here is not one of them. Chad, or Tchad as they call it locally, as if named by some passing Yorkshireman, is really no more than a cartographer's patch. The French left it here as somewhere to keep the bottom of the Sahara in, and for those platoons of foreign-legionnaires who had the most to forget. It's about the size of Germany, with a population of just 9m. I remember it from my school atlas — it had the lowest per-capita income in the world. It isn't quite the poorest country on Earth any more, but it is way, way down there: 80% of the population live below the poverty line, 80% work the sand. Its primary exports are a handkerchief of cotton, a few cattle and a near-monopoly of the world's gum arabic needs. Gum arabic is essential in the manufacture of good-quality watercolours. Not a lot of people know that; in fact not a lot of people know anything about landlocked Chad. It has no airline, no railways; it has 33,400 kilometres of road, but only 267 kilometres of them are tarmacked. Life expectancy is 48 years, and only if you don't expect much. It does, though, have a glut of human diversity: 200 ethnic groups. In the north, the Goran Zaghawa, Kanembou, Ouaddai, Baguirmi, Hadjerai, Fulbe, Kotoko, Hausa, Boulala and Maba; all Arab and Muslim. In the south are the Moundang, Moussei and Massa, who are for the most part Christian, which in Africa always comes hyphenated with animist, and they're black. They are the blackest black, blue-black, matt-black black you've ever seen.
Chad, along with Sudan, is hung across one of the least reported, potentially most volatile cultural fault lines in the world: the border between black and Arab Africa. Before the Europeans ever arrived there was a history of exploitation, slavery and massacre. Here, the appellation Muslim or Christian comes with baggage and chains. Chad isn't one of those failed states we hear so much about from smug, overachieving nations: rather it's a stalled state, one that never really made it off the starting blocks of independence. It goes through the stately motions, and boasts plenty of initials after its name from international organisations.
It has ambassadors and a billion dollars of debt, it signs international treaties (though I notice it hasn't ratified the international law of the sea yet), but it isn't defined by the niceties of statesmanship. Like Sudan, Chad is a slave to the land on which it precariously squats, earth blasted and dominated by the sun. This is the hottest place I've ever been. Temperatures are regularly in the fifties; they have climbed the thirties before sunrise. This isn't just weather, something mundane to be endured: it's a godlike thing, a shimmering, psychotic, physical presence. It's like living with a bright murderer. Achievement is not measured here, as it is in the damp, green First World, by invention and energy, but by the ability to do as little as possible, for as long as possible, in as much shade as possible.
Chad has three pressing problems. It has the black curse of Africa: unexploited oil. It has the same flag as Romania, and it has between 100,000 and 200,000 refugees. It has gone to the UN to protest about the flag business. To get about, you either hitch a lift on a lorry, hire a four-wheel-drive and stutter across the desert, or beg a seat on one of the small humanitarian flights that sustain a skeletal relief effort. After a couple of days hanging out in the two-storey breeze-block and barbed-wire boredom of Ndjamena, we managed to get a flight into the east. At the airport the top-secret French Mirage fighters screamed secretly into the shimmering morning air to spy on North Africa. The French can never actually leave their old colonies. They hang around like gun-toting divorced husbands. We fly to Abéché, which puts up with another French base; legionnaires lounging in the shadow of their Jeeps, sporting nut-hugging camouflage shorts and coquettish little berets. For all their surly élan, they always look like the backing group for the Village People.
We drive on to Iriba, a town made of mud that rises out of the desert like geometric worm casts. The deafening silence is broken only by the morning throb of the baker's generator and the occasional call of a lovesick donkey. There is nothing to see here, nothing to play at, nothing to talk about, nothing to do, except squat in the shade and throw stones at meagre chickens. You can't help but wonder at the terrifying boredom threshold you'd need to call this place home.
Iriba has the only hospital for the thousands of refugees stretched across hundreds of miles of border. It's a brick building of three or four little wards and a room that makes do as an operating theatre. In the compound are some sagging, dusty tents for the therapeutic feeding of malnourished children, and there is some shade for their mothers and those who have no bed. The hospital is run by Médecins Sans Frontières — Chad has few doctors, and they all work in the capital or for the UN.
There is only one doctor-surgeon, a Belgian girl who looks like she has stepped from a Frans Hals painting; bosomy and blonde, she's like a ghost among her black patients. She dreams Belgium dreams, of dairy products, yoghurt, cheese, fountains of milk. She makes her rounds with professional cheerfulness. The sick regard her with that stoic fatalism that is the small dignity of African hospitals. Just having made it here is staggering good fortune.
She stops at the bed of a woman who has given birth to tiny twin boys. They lie like little plucked birds, their bodies flickering with breath. Their mother arranges her shawl to give them shade, gently flicks away the flies — but she won't feed them. She is lactating but she won't feed them. And the hospital won't give them powdered milk because they can't guarantee its supply for the whole of their infancy. It's a standoff. The mother won't or can't say why, one remorseless hour at a time, she can starve her sons to death. She lies apart with an impassive, locked-away beauty, like an odalisque, watching her boys eke out their tiny reserves of existence. The doctor is frustrated. The mother stares, speechlessly daring judgment. The universal blessing of children is for the refugee a curse. How could a lonely girl without a husband or family welcome another pair of mouths, two widow's mites, into this stark, hopeless life? I can only guess at the monstrous ill fortune and misery that led her to this hopeless impasse. She can't kill her babies, as women sometimes do out here in extremis, but she can't help them into her world either, so she lies here silently jammed between the intolerable and the unbearable.
Outside, a 13-year-old boy takes painful little steps, helped by an orderly. His brother stepped on the mine that killed him and took this boy's foot, and doctors had to remove one of his testicles. A group of men sitting in the shade give him a little clap. They may be guerrillas: they have bullet and shrapnel wounds; one is paralysed. Nobody asks.
