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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs |
CHAD: Embattled Chad offers assistance of stretched army
NDJAMENA, 17 Nov 2006 (IRIN) - With humanitarian groups sounding the alarm about the violence in eastern Chad near Sudan, the Chadian government has proposed sending troops south to neighbouring Central African Republic (CAR) to battle rebels there who it said are being backed by Sudan.
“Chad cannot be indifferent to the situation that prevails,” Prime Minister Pascal Yoadimnadji told the National Assembly on Thursday.
Chad is already contributing troops to a regional peacekeeping force in CAR but the prime minister said he wants to send more.
“We must do more to help the Central African government by reinforcing the forces already present and ensuring that Sudanese government aggression fails,” he said.
Sudan has denied backing fighters in either CAR or Chad.
Armed conflict began in Sudan’s western Darfur region nearly four years ago causing at least 218,000 Sudanese refugees to seek shelter in Chad. More recently the violence has spread to both Chad and CAR while in Darfur some two million people have been displaced and at least 200,000 others are estimated to have died.
Chad is also fighting a rebellion against the government of President Idriss Deby that aid agencies say has diverted its army away from the border, opening the door to militia attacks launched from Sudanese territory.
Over 60,000 people have been displaced, including thousands since the end of the rainy season in late September, and there have been several well-documented massacres.
State of emergency
On Monday the Chadian government declared a state of emergency in the east as well as the capital Ndjamena and several parts of the country, blaming Sudan for the worsening violence.
“Faced with this generalised war that the Sudanese government has imposed on us, all Chadians are being asked to mobilise to defend our country and assure our security and national unity,” Yoadimnadji said Thursday.
United Nations Secretary-General Koffi Annan on Wednesday called for an international presence on Sudan’s border with Chad to prevent the Darfur conflict from spreading.
The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and other aid agencies in Chad have been asking for increased protection since a spate of hijackings and attacks on aid workers started last year. More than 40 aid agency vehicles have been stolen at gunpoint and one aid worker was involved in a near-fatal shooting in May. Some areas of eastern Chad have become too dangerous to visit, and most UN convoys travel with a heavily armed Chadian army escort.
“You have cross-border attacks and we are looking at the possibility of putting UN observers or some international presence on the border and working with the government of Chad to ensure that the refugees who are in Chad are protected and to ensure that cross-border attacks would also be minimised,” Annan said.
He opened a high-level meeting with Sudanese leaders in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa, on Thursday. Sudan agreed in principle to the deployment of UN peacekeepers in Darfur alongside African Union forces, according to officials who attended the meeting.
A UN fact-finding mission is also due to travel to Chad and CAR next week.
New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) released a report on Thursday with dozens of accounts from survivors of militia attacks in eastern Chad over the past few weeks. According to a 21-year-old man injured in an attack on 7 November, the perpetrators were a mixed group of Chadians and Sudanese combatants.
"They tied two women up and burned them in their house - they wanted to steal the blankets and the women begged them not to,” HRW quoted the man as saying.
Regionalised conflict
Leslie Lefkow, Darfur researcher for HRW, told IRIN on Friday that the fresh violence in Chad is partly being triggered by the end of seasonal rains and the migration of nomads.
“But it’s part of the broader picture of increasing violence against civilians all along this regional area,” she said. “There’s been instability in Chad for years and equally one can say in CAR. What the Darfur crisis has done is to create linkages between armed groups in the different countries."
She said it reminded her of the regional dynamics in West Africa among Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cote d'Ivoire and Guinea.
"You see the circulation of armed groups and support of armed groups going across the border and it just becomes a kind of vicious circle,” she said.
Humanitarian consequences
Some 68,000 Chadians have been displaced within the east of the country in the past year. In the past week some 5,000 newly displaced have converged on a site for internally displaced people in Habile, 45 km southeast of the town of Goz Beida, according to the UN refugee agency.
The NGO Oxfam has announced that it might have to cut daily water rations allotted to the tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees living in camps in southeastern Chad.
“When you have less water for more people the possibility of public health consequences is on the increase,” Oxfam spokeswoman for West Africa Lauren Gelfand told IRIN on Friday.
Gelfand said that for the newly arrived Chadians, "the risk of epidemic is very, very high… They don’t have access to consistent water, sanitation or health care.”
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This material comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this item, please retain this credit and disclaimer. Quotations or extracts should include attribution to the original sources. All materials copyright © UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2006
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