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A pattern of cross-border attacks continues to threaten civilians on the border of Eastern Chad and Darfur, reports David Buchbinder, a researcher with Human Rights Watch, after three trips to the region. Noting the bureaucratic impasses associated with deploying a United Nations force to the region and the lack of security for humanitarian operations, David believes that the prospects for peace and security are far off.
TRANSCRIPT:
JERRY FOWLER: My guest today is David Buchbinder, a researcher at Human Rights Watch. Through the course of 2006 he conducted three missions to Eastern Chad, occasionally crossing into Darfur. David, thanks for joining us.
DAVID BUCHBINDER: It is my pleasure to be here.
JERRY FOWLER: David, the last time we talked about Chad was in early November when you were on the ground there and we interviewed your colleague, Leslie Lefkow. Could you give us a brief update on what has happened in eastern Chad in the last couple of months?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: Sure. There has sort of been a pattern of cross-border militia attacks that we started seeing the end of 2005 and the beginning of 2006. The last couple of months, November and December, those cross-border incursions continued and we also started to see a pattern of violence developing within Chad. There were a lot of people killed in this period; about 300 civilians were killed in the Chad-Sudan border zone, eastern Chad. At the same time there were major incursions from Darfur of Chadian rebels that are seeking to overthrow President Idriss Déby, the president of Chad. These rebels have not been attacking civilians; their aim is to topple the government. But there were very heavy clashes in Eastern and Northern Chad between government security forces and these Chadian rebels, and the outcome of that pattern of violence was that the rebels were more or less crushed by the Chadian security forces who were assisted by French military, and one of the most militarily powerful Chadian rebel groups signed a peace accord with the Chadian government. The others declined to sign a peace accord and continue to seek to topple the government of Chad.
JERRY FOWLER: Well when you say the rebels were crushed by the Chadian military, apart from the group that signed the peace agreement, are the others basically incapable of operating now is that a threat that has been eliminated by the Chadian government?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: I would say no. It is hard to get definitive information because there are such conflicting casualty counts coming out of both sides, totally at variance of one another, what the Chadian government says and what rebel movements are saying in terms of how many men have been killed and what equipment has been taken, but we can say that the remaining rebel groups are still militarily potent although I think we might say that they are regrouping now. One key thing is that these Chadian rebel groups have apparently been receiving support from Khartoum; the Government of Sudan has supported some of these Chadian rebel groups. It is not like they are just cut off and just taking refuge in Darfur, they have external sponsorship, so I do not think the Chadian rebel threat is gone at all.
JERRY FOWLER: At one point the rebels occupied the city of Abéché in Eastern Chad which was kind of the hub of the international humanitarian effort to provide aid to Darfurian refugees who were living in Eastern Chad. Was that before or after what you are describing as their being crushed by the Chadian forces?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: Yes, that was before; that was the very beginning of this most recent round of combat between Chad rebels and the Chadian government, and I think, if my memory serves me correctly, that Abéché fell on November 25th, possibly 26th, and that was a great sort of blow to the morale of the Chadian government and Chadian security forces because it is a strategic prize and it fell with relatively little resistance. The Chad rebels did not hold it for long. They fought with the Chadian security forces that were there, they took the city, there were some warehouses that were raided—Chadian military warehouses—and the next day they left. In the ensuing couple of weeks is when we saw the bulk of the hostilities, especially in Eastern Chad and some parts of Northern Chad.
JERRY FOWLER: Then you mentioned that in those hostilities, the Chadian military was assisted by the French who have a garrison there in Abéché and have some military forces on the ground. What is your understanding of the nature of the French assistance?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: France has about 1,200 military personnel in Chad, and that includes some mirage aircraft. France has sort of a military cooperation agreement with the Chadian government. That might not be the exact terminology of what exists contractually, but there is a document that establishes French military cooperation with Chad, and what France has been doing in 2006, what we have been seeing is that they have been deploying their combat aircraft to basically conduct surveillance of Chadian rebel positions, and they have been sharing that information with the Chadian security forces. It has been very crucial support. It helped the Chadian government in April when they were defending against rebel columns that actually reached the capital, N’Djamena—there was street fighting in the capital—and France shared information then. France did the same thing in November and December. I think the conventional wisdom is without the French military support, the Chadian government would not be able to withstand these rebel attacks.
JERRY FOWLER: We have been talking about one aspect of the conflict in Eastern Chad which is these Chadian rebel groups who are receiving some support from the government of Sudan and then fighting the government of Chad, but that is not the only component of violence. What are the other key components of violence in Eastern Chad?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: It is a key component of the military-on-military violence, but in terms of the violence against civilians, it is really not significant compared to two other patterns that we are seeing. One is the cross-border incursions of militia groups from Darfur. Some of these are the famed Janjaweed, the notorious Janjaweed militias that conducted war crimes and ethnic cleansing in Darfur in 2003 and 2004. These are Sudanese government aligned paramilitary groups, largely made up of Sudanese and Chadian Arabs. Those are the militias that have been crossing into Eastern Chad as I said earlier, starting in late 2005 and early in 2006, and those are the incursions that we have been seeing crossing deeper and deeper into Chad with time. That is the second pattern. The third pattern is intercommunal violence. This is where we have been seeing a militarization of communities in Eastern Chad, and part of the reason for that is connected to the second pattern which I talked about, those cross-border incursions. What has been happening is those cross-border incursions have been targeting groups based on ethnicity. If you just look at the map and you plot on that map the villages that have been attacked, you can see that almost without exception, villages that are attacked by those cross-border incursions are non-Arab such that they are the Murrow and the Dadjo and the Masaalit ethnic groups and about ten other ethnic groups in this area where I have been doing most of my research, where there have been most of these attacks against civilians, but not so much against Arab civilians. With the establishment of that pattern, you have started to see the non-Arab ethnic groups arming themselves with automatic weapons when they can get them and creating alliances with other local self-defense groups with a mutual defense agreement. The problem, and what has fed this communal violence, is that these local self-defense militias made up of non-Arabs have, in some instances, been guilty of reprisal attacks against Arab civilians.
JERRY FOWLER: Arab civilians in Chad?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: Inside of Chad, because an association has been created whereas violence will affect an area, it will affect non-Arab villages in that area, Arabs will be spared violence, and because of that fact, non-Arabs in this area in Eastern Chad will characterize or stereotype Arabs as Janjaweed. That identity, that paramilitary group from Darfur, that identity is being grafted onto these Chadian Arab civilians in Eastern Chad. That is a political incursion, or an incursion of an identity from Darfur onto these Chadian civilians, and in some cases that I documented most recently, we have been seeing these non-Arab self-defense forces attacking Arab civilians.
JERRY FOWLER: Is there otherwise a connection between the Janjaweed or other militias crossing over and Arab civilians in Chad?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: Yes; it gets a bit complex, but Chadian Arabs living in Eastern Chad have crossed into Darfur in recent decades; some of it because of attacks by the Chadian government against them. They took refuge in Eastern Chad; this was under the rule of President Hissène Habré who was Déby’s immediate predecessor. Déby was at that time in the Chadian military, and he was responsible for some of those attacks against Chadian Arab civilians in Eastern Chad.
JERRY FOWLER: What was motivating those attacks?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: This was part of President Hissène Habré’s counterinsurgency back then, so there were some Chadian Arab rebel groups, but I must admit that I do not have expertise in that counterinsurgency, so I really could not speak much to the motivation for that. I do know that those Chadian Arabs were attacked, and I do know that they took refuge in Darfur, and many of them subsequently were recruited into these Janjaweed militias by the government of Sudan and its agents when it began to fight its counterinsurgency against Sudanese rebels in 2003. The Janjaweed are not a strictly Sudanese organization and were not. They included many Chadian Arabs and continue to. Now, you are seeing these cross-border incursions, many of the victims of violence have identified members of these Janjaweed militias as Chadians, people that they knew. They have returned to Chad, this time on horseback, armed, raiding civilian villages in Eastern Chad.
JERRY FOWLER: My understanding is that somewhere in the neighborhood of 100,000 Chadian civilians have been displaced in the last year in Eastern Chad. Do you have a sense of what percentage of that displacement is among the non-Arab population as a result of these incursions and what percentage is among the Arab population as a result of reprisal attacks?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: That is a good question. These reprisal attacks constitute a minority of the violence in the area. I must say that the majority of the attacks are against non-Arab civilians, and I just wanted to underline that. Also, we cannot really say that the majority of these attacks are carried out by Janjaweed, classic Janjaweed, under the definition that I used earlier that they have ties to the Sudanese government because basically, no one is taking credit for these attacks, so basically you might have to contend yourself with calling them “unidentified, armed groups,” but again, the pattern generally holds that it is non-Arabs that are coming under attack, and I think it could also be said that the majority of these displaced people are non-Arabs as well. I do not know of any ethnic breakdown of the displaced people, but I did see Arab displaced people returning to their areas of origin, to their home villages, in late November after a sort of peace treaty was signed. I know that there was some temporary displacement of Arabs, and in speaking with them, some of them left because their village came under attack; others left because they were afraid of reprisal attacks, but I have no numbers on those Arab displaced persons.
JERRY FOWLER: Human Rights Watch issued a report very recently on Chad and one of its recommendations was the deployment of a robust, international military force along the border, along with human rights monitors, along the Chad-Sudan border. I think most people who have listened to this program have heard a lot about the idea of a military force in Darfur and the fact that is seems to be held up by Sudanese opposition. What are the obstacles to deploying a force along the Chad-Sudan border, deliberately on the Chad side of the border?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: The obstacles are numerous, but they are different from the obstacles that have prevented a United Nations force from deploying to Darfur. The key difference between deploying a force to Darfur and deploying a force to Eastern Chad is that of consent. The biggest hurdle of deploying to Darfur has been that the Sudanese government has the pleasure of consenting to this force, and it has not consented, and as a result, that force has basically, to summarize, not been able to deploy. In Eastern Chad, there is a greater chance that the Chadian government would consent to that, although they have not given a green light to that exactly. They say they agree in principle to the deployment of the force, but there are some reservations on the part of the Chadian government, aside from internal splits within the government. I think that one concern that Chad has is that they are afraid that that Eastern Chad border force would be used as a stepping stone into Darfur for the United Nations, and they do not want to do that in my understanding.
JERRY FOWLER: The Chadian government does not want to do that?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: Yes, in my understanding, the Chadian government is concerned that that should not happen.
JERRY FOWLER: Because that would increase their conflict with Khartoum?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: Presumably; of course the Chadian government has not had qualms about supporting Sudanese rebels—these are the Sudanese rebels that have been fighting against Sudanese government forces in Darfur—but it seems that, and again this is speculation because I do not know what the motivation of the Chadian government is, but that they would not want to push Khartoum that far.
That is one hurdle. Another hurdle is political will. The United Nations Security Council appears to be determined to do something about the problem in Chad, and not strictly vis-à-vis the problem in Darfur. It has become apparent with time that while there is a strong cross-border element to the problems that we have been seeing in Eastern Chad that Chad has problems of its own. The Security Council wants to do something; whether it will be able to do that is another question. Right now the Security Council has deployed a technical assessment mission—the second such mission in the last couple of months—and that mission is going to Eastern Chad and northeastern Central African Republic, and they are going to assess the possibility of deploying this force to Eastern Chad and northeastern Central African Republic, but the problem that they have with this is that there is no peace to keep in Eastern Chad in this area, and the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations just hates going into a situation like that; they would much rather have some kind of peace treaty in place between the Chadian government and the Chadian rebels, and once that happened, they would be much more happy about going out there to Eastern Chad with some kind of military force to protect civilians.
That is another hurdle. One final thing would be the troop contributors. While the Security Council may want to do something about Eastern Chad, they may not also want to be the ones to be contributing the soldiers to man this force, so the question is who is that going to be, and there is no answer yet.
JERRY FOWLER: It sounds like from all of those things the prospect of deploying any kind of force to the border may be quite a ways off.
DAVID BUCHBINDER: Yes, I think that is a good way to put it. I do not think that these challenges are insurmountable, but it appears that this is not going to be something that happens very quickly.
JERRY FOWLER: In the meantime, there are over 200,000 refugees from Darfur who are in Eastern Chad who basically rely upon a United Nations led humanitarian operation for their survival, and now there is something in the neighborhood of 100,000 Chadian civilians who have been displaced and presumably are in need of assistance. How viable is that continued international humanitarian operation given the current security situation?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: It has become a major problem. In December when there was all out fighting in Eastern Chad between the government and these rebels and you had rebels taking towns, the United Nations had to draw down its humanitarian presence from the East very significantly. I think they just left skeleton staff left in some places; all international staff was evacuated. Some of these refugee camps in the northeast, the United Nations had to implement contingency planning where they passed a responsibility for conducting basic operations in the camp and running the camps to refugee committees themselves and some national staff. It really got down to some very dire situations in December, and there was also a major problem with the delivery of humanitarian aid due to insecurity on the roads. Things have improved since then; there is still Chadian rebel activity in Chad and they are still taking towns, but it is not happening on the same level, and the humanitarian presence has ramped back up, although I think that insecurity is going to continue to compromise humanitarian aid. It is a problem now but it could be an even greater problem in a couple months because it is the dry season now, and as these hundreds of thousands of displaced people that had to leave their homes—some of them with nothing—as they run out of food and they become increasingly dependent on humanitarian aid, they become increasingly vulnerable should that aid be cut as it was in December.
JERRY FOWLER: I have been speaking with David Buchbinder who is a researcher at Human Rights Watch. David, thanks for taking the time to be with us.
DAVID BUCHBINDER: My pleasure.
