Chad says repels rebel attack on eastern town
Oct 23, 2006 (N’DJAMENA) — A newly formed rebel group attacked a town in remote eastern Chad near the border with Sudan on Sunday but the government said on Monday its forces had repelled the assault and were back in control.
“The rebels infiltrated the town of Goz Beida in the east of Chad at around 1600 (1500 GMT). They were pushed back by the Chadian national army,” Communication Minister Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor told Reuters by telephone.
He had no immediate details on casualties.
The insurgents, calling themselves the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD) — the latest in a string of titles apparently meant to group various rebel factions, said the attack was meant as a wake-up call for the government.
“We want to make the government in N’Djamena and our partners realise that the situation can’t go on like this,” Acheikh Ibn Oumar, a Paris-based rebel spokesman who said he represented the UFDD, told French radio.
“There has to be a solution that restores state order, organises true democratic polls and ends the catastrophic way the state is being run.”
Fighting in Sudan’s Darfur region, which has killed tens of thousands of people since 2003 and displaced more than two million, has often spilled over into Chad, where several rebel groups are fighting to topple President Idriss Deby.
Chadian rebels attacked the capital N’Djamena in April in a lightning assault launched from the east, racing across the desert in pick-up trucks from the Sudan border region three weeks before an election which returned Deby for a third term.
The rebels have demanded that the president — who has ruled since seizing power in a 1990 revolt which also began in the east — step down and hold fresh elections.
REBEL DIVIDE
An aid worker in Goz Beida, which lies just over 100 km (60 miles) from the border with Darfur and is home to thousands of displaced civilians, said there had been shooting shortly before the rebels arrived in the town.
“They came to our office. They spoke to us and behaved well … They said they were rebels from the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD),” the aid worker said.
“Before they arrived we heard shooting but nothing after that … They took control of the town and the main roads out to (the towns of) Abeche and Ade … They left overnight and the situation is calm this morning.”
Since the April attack on N’Djamena, the rebel coalition has splintered along rival ethnic and political lines. Recent clashes along the border region with Darfur have involved separate rebel groups rather than one united front.
Janjaweed militia fighters, who are assisting the Sudanese army in Darfur against Sudanese rebels, have also been responsible for cross-border raids into Chad and appear to be working in alliance with the Chadian rebels.
(Reuters)