May 12, 2010: The UN has warned that, if Chad cannot provide security for the food convoys coming in from Libya and Cameroon, aid agencies will not be able to feed some two million starving people (most of them locals, not refugees) in Chad. With UN peacekeepers leaving (at the request of the government) this month, the only ones available to protect the food convoys, and refugee camps, is the army and police. But Chadian security forces have, so far, proved too inefficient and corrupt to get the job done. The bandits, some of them soldiers and police, steal the food aid and then sell it to merchants, who offer it in markets, or to the aid agencies desperate to prevent famine deaths.

Increased banditry in the Central African Republic (CAR) has sent over a thousand refugees into Chad. The UN has been unable to protect refugee camps in CAR, and is sometimes forced to send refugees hundreds of kilometers, on foot, to the Chad border, to escape the bandits. The breakdown of order is the result of a failure to settle the civil war, that has been intermittently active for over a decade.