An Illushyn-76 transport aircraft chartered by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) will leave Karachi on Wednesday with the last of 7,000 Pakistan manufactured tents purchased to house Sudanese refugees fleeing to neighbouring Chad.
The latest UN Refugee Agency flight, carrying 778 tents, is part of a world-wide airlift of emergency supplies for refugees driven from Sudan by ethnic conflict.
The flight is the ninth in the past two weeks to carry tents from Pakistan and follows another flight from Karachi to N'djamena on Tuesday evening.
UNHCR has frequently bought tents for emergency operations from manufacturers in Pakistani with contracts awarded on the basis of competitive bidding. Additional tents were moved from Pakistan earlier this year.
UNHCR has had a long relationship with Pakistan in addition to its role as a source of materials used world-wide for refugees. Pakistan has hosted millions of Afghan refugees in the decades since they first fled war in Afghanistan in 1979.
"Pakistan has worked closely with UNHCR for many years in humanitarian crises, helping refugees both through government co-operation and commercial contracts," said Guenet Guebre-Christos, head of the UN Refugee Agency in Pakistan.
UN officials have called the current situation in Sudan and Chad the "world's worst humanitarian emergency."
Nearly 90,000 Sudanese refugees have now been moved into eight camps set up by UNHCR and its partners well away from the Chad-Sudan border.
But there is a danger more refugees could flow across the border from the Darfur region, where there are about a million Sudanese in displaced persons camps.
Hundreds of newly arrived refugees have crossed to Chad each week for the past two months following attacks on their villages in early April.
In the southern most part of the border zones where the rainy season has already begun, UNHCR completed the transfer of refugees to camps and shifted its logistics operation further north to Ade.
It is rushing to move the estimated 15,000 refugees near Ade to the new camp at Djabai that opened last week.
Further north, UNHCR is looking for an additional site near the existing camp of Broidjing- where some of the tents from Karachi were used. Broidjing now has 7,809 registered refugees and an estimated 5,000 who arrived on their own.
UNHCR must either expand the site, if enough water can be found, or set up a new camp in the area.
Also on Wednesday, UNHCR is starting the last segment of the emergency airlift with a series of flights starting from Tanzania. An IL-76 plane will bring 84,000 blankets, 8,000 kitchen flights from Denmark and Germany have already been completed.
The international airlift follows one in February and March when UNHCR brought to Chad 511 tonnes of tents, jerry cans blankets and other supplies on 13 flights from Denmark, Tanzania and Pakistan.
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