MuseumDESCRIPTION:
Human Rights Watch researcher David Buchbinder returns to Voices on Genocide Prevention to analyze the conflict in Chad and how it relates to violence across the border in Sudan.
TRANSCRIPT:
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: This is Bridget Conley-Zilkic, and with me today is David Buchbinder who is a researcher with Human Rights Watch. David, thank you for joining me today.
DAVID BUCHBINDER: Pleasure to be here.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: I’d like to start by asking you to give our audience just a broad overview, a little background on the current situation today in Chad, which neighbors Sudan.
DAVID BUCHBINDER: Chad is a very large, very poor country dead center Central Africa, just west of Sudan. Chad has seen political violence, internal conflict, almost from the day it got its independence from France in 1960. So long history of civil war. The President of Chad, Idriss Déby, came to power in a coup d’état in 1990. He was backed by the Sudanese government. Currently Déby is fighting an insurgency once again that’s back by the Sudanese government, based in Darfur. And so that’s the sort of the dominant story of Chad’s political history and its past.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: David, can you tell me a little bit about the political system within Chad?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: Chad is notionally a sort of multi-party democracy, but in reality it is a closed system. There is no sort of succession through the vote. There have been a few elections since President Déby took power in 1990. Three of them -- all of them -- have been plagued by fraud, irregularities. So what happens in Chad is that those who have ambitions to be president seek to overthrow the government. That’s part of why we have this sort of ongoing conflict. Chad has a politics of factional conflict, whereas in the United States we might have a multiparty democracy. In Chad presidential politics is almost indistinguishable from civil war. That’s the way they-- the sort of unusual way they choose their leaders.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And that brings us somewhat up to speed -- very quickly, obviously -- to try to understand what happened in Chad in late January of this year of 2008, when rebels based in neighboring Sudan began a large scale offensive that really culminated in an attack on N’Djamena, the capital, in early February. Can you tell us a little bit about who these rebels were, how they managed to get that far into the country and what their goals are?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: Sure. President Déby has faced a number of sort of insurgencies, insurgent groups in the 18 years that he has been in power. The Chadian rebel insurgency in its current iteration reached a sort of critical point in late 2005. When he [President Deby] saw mass defections from his armed forces a lot of this was subsequent to changes that he made to the constitution to allow him to stand for a third term in office. So he saw lots of defections from his military, including his own ethnic group, the Zaghawa. They went into Darfur where they received some backing from the Sudanese government.
What happened in late January was the second time actually that these rebels have reached N’Djamena, the capital. And they launched from their bases in Darfur toward the end of January, and they sped across the country avoiding the fortified town that Déby has used as the backbone of his defense. They just blew right by them and didn’t really meet much resistance until they were 50 kilometers outside of N’Djamena when they won a decisive battle with Chadian government forces on February 1st which opened the road to the capital. There was street fighting for 48 hours on February 2nd and 3rd in the capital.
The rebels were eventually beaten back by the Chadian government with some support from French forces. Chad is sort of a client state of France. France has 1,100 soldiers permanently based in Chad, and they-- basically they defended the airport in N’Djamena which was helpful, although not necessarily decisive.
Who are the rebels? The rebels who were defeated on the 3rd and retreated to their bases in Darfur are Chadian nationals, predominately from northern nomadic ethnic groups in Chad. The sort of-- these are Muslim generally. Chad is divided between north and south, Muslims in the north, Christians in the south. And the Christians are generally not involved in the insurgency. These are northern nomadic Muslim ethnic groups, including President Déby’s own Zaghawa ethnic group. Some of his very close family members are rebel leaders. And so it’s a federation of about three main ethnic groups including Déby’s own, and also including Arab rebel groups.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And one point of interest there is that you said some of the Chadian rebels who are backed by Sudan are Zaghawa, who are among the primary victims of the Sudanese government inside Darfur.
DAVID BUCHBINDER: Yeah. This gets into the sort of the contest, the conflict between the governments of Chad and Sudan. Obviously as we all know Sudan has been-- the Sudanese government has been fighting an insurgency of its own in Darfur. This is the Darfur conflict. And we hear a lot about the civilian consequences of the conflict, but at its core there’s an insurgency there. There are Darfur rebels fighting against the Sudanese government in Darfur. And many of those rebels are Zaghawa nationals.
This is a sort of an old story in Africa which is that when the Chad/Sudan border was drawn in the early part of the 20th Century, it bisected the Zaghawa homeland. Some of the Zaghawa wound up in Darfur -- some of the Zaghawa in Sudan – [and] some of the Zaghawa wound up in Chad. When we had a Zaghawa elected president in Chad, or not elected but taking power in Chad in 1990, you saw the sort of the preconditions for what became a proxy war. So as the Sudanese Zaghawa in Darfur are fighting against the Sudanese government with time they come to receive support from the Zaghawa government of Chad.
The Chadian government is supporting Sudanese rebels that are fighting in Darfur, especially one faction, the JEM, the Justice and Equality Movement. There are actually family connections between senior leadership in the JEM Darfur rebels and the Chadian government. So that’s a very sort of intimate embrace that the, you know, on the part of the Chadian government for these JEM rebels. The JEM rebels are actually very important for the defensive strategy of President Déby. Déby needs these rebels to help him fight off these offensives by the Chadian rebels. So there’s a very strong interconnection there.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: So were the JEM involved in fighting the rebels who had come close to Déby around N’Djamena?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: They were. The JEM left their bases in Jebel Moon in West Darfur when they saw where things were going and they sped back to N’Djamena to help fight off the Chadian rebels. And, you know, this actually shows you some of the interconnections. After the JEM left its bases in Jebel Moon those same areas came under attack by Sudanese armed forces who sought to take advantage of this move, this movement of JEM forces to seize some strategic ground. There were many civilians killed in those attacks. So this is, you know, this is-- that’s just another day in a proxy war.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And if we can switch gears a little bit and talk about the international response to upheaval in Chad. There is expected to be a European force that’s currently deploying to Chad. What is their role going to be? What are they mandated to do, and who is forming that force?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: Yeah. In September 2007 the United Nations Security Council approved a resolution to deploy a UN EU hybrid force to Eastern Chad and also to Central African Republic in the northeastern corner. That force was-- there’s a UN humanitarian component of that force and there’s an EU military component of the force. The EU military component is known was EUFOR. It’s supposed to be about 3,700 soldiers who are mandated to protect civilians in Eastern Chad, primarily refugees, to a lesser extent displaced persons and also local population.
So in Eastern Chad there are about 220,000 Sudanese refugees. There’s about 180,000 internally displaced Chadians, and protecting them will be the primary mission of these European Union soldiers. France, as the colonial power in Chad, makes up the overwhelming majority of these 3,700 soldiers. I think it’s something on the level of 2,000 French soldiers, total. So it’s disproportionately French. Obviously this gets a little dicey given that the French government and French military are backing militarily the Chadian government. So you want to make sure that this European Union Force sticks very strictly to its mandate, its civilian protection mandate, and does not get involved in this proxy war that’s going on. There are also-- there’s a strong component of Irish soldiers in the force as well as Polish soldiers. Those three nations are the primary troop contributors.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And when are they expected to be at full force?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: EUFOR started to deploy to Chad in January, the first soldiers started to arrive. And they reached their initial operating capacity in March of this year. And they are projecting to reach their full operational capacity in June, which is right before the rains begin in Chad, which is-- basically bogs down everything. Nothing moves after the rains. So they want to make sure they deploy before the rains start.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: Is there any political process on the international level in Chad? Are there any negotiations or discussions with the rebel forces?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: There have been a number of attempts to broker some kind of peace deal between the Chadian government and the Chadian rebels, the two. There has been no success so far. It seems like both sides prefer the military option to diplomacy. There have also been a number of attempts to defuse the proxy war between Chad and Sudan. The two countries have signed five peace treaties so far, and none of those have held. Most recently they signed one in-- the two countries signed one in March in Dakar, and within a week both sides were accusing the other of breaching the agreement. There’s ongoing diplomatic efforts, but none successful.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And if we can get to what is probably the heart of the matter for a human rights investigator and for us as well, what are the potential threats to civilian groups because of the internal dynamics in Chad, which of course as you have explained very well, are connected to the proxy war across the border with Darfur. What threats do you see looming? What should we be on the watch out for?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: Yeah. What’s important to note, that the Chadian rebels tend not to directly attack civilians. It’s happened, but they generally target Chadian government military forces. It’s that kind of war. It’s not a war where there are a lot of direct attacks against civilians. So that’s not really the main concern as far as civilian protection goes.
Under the scenario of a successful coup d’état, however, we would have a lot of concerns about consequences for civilians. So if the Chadian rebels backed by Sudan were to succeed in overthrowing the Déby government, I for one would be very worried about the 100,000 Zaghawa refugees in Eastern Chad. That’s a huge number of people who would be living in a country wherein they had previously been the beneficiaries of state prerogative and power, and there would be a very sudden inversion of the power dynamic, and that would be a concern of mine. Not just that there could be direct attacks against some of these camps which have been militarized to varying extents by Darfur rebels, but also in some of the camps where there are mixed camps. Let’s say where there have been, let’s say for example, Kounoungo Camp which is half of Zaghawa and 25 percent Tama in an area in Northeastern Chad where there’s been a lot of violence between the Tama and the Zaghawa. I’d worry about that camp as well. I’d worry about the Zaghawas there and, you know, even including that there could be violence by civilians against civilians. So under those circumstances I’d would really, I would be very hopeful that the European Union Force that is out there in Chad mandated to protect civilians would be in place, would be in position to do something about that were there to be a risk of direct attacks against civilians.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: And just as a final question, what are the human rights abuses that you’re seeing currently in Chad?
DAVID BUCHBINDER: Well, as we discussed there was a major attempt to overthrow the Chadian government in early February and there was street fighting in N’Djamena. And subsequent to that, after the Chadian rebels were beaten back, we saw extensive human rights abuses in the capital. Lot’s of arbitrary arrests and detention wherein the Chadian security forces rounded up not only those they suspected of being rebels, but also political opponents. So that’s an ongoing concern. That’s very true to form. The same thing happened in 2006 the last time there was fighting in the capital when Chadian rebels reached the capital then. We saw the same thing, arbitrary arrests and detention. So that’s sort of the dramatic rights abuses that we’ve been seeing in the capital. But on the sort of low level out in the east it’s not a good place to be a civilian. We still see sort of small scale attacks against civilians, arbitrary arrests as well happen out east. And also there is a, you know, a general problem in Chad of recruitment of children to armed forces.
BRIDGET CONLEY-ZILKIC: David, thank you very much for taking the time to speak with me today.
DAVID BUCHBINDER: My pleasure.
NARRATOR: You have been listening to Voices on Genocide Prevention, from United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. To learn more about preventing genocide, join us online at www.ushmm.org/conscience. There you’ll also find the Voices on Genocide Prevention weblog.
