Chad army enters Sudan to pursue rebels
Dece 15, 2006 (KHARTOUM) — Chadian troops entered Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region and fought Chadian rebels Friday as the U.N. and humanitarian aid groups prepared to pull some workers out of a key border town, fearing an imminent battle there.
The Chadian incursion threatened a new escalation of violence in the vast Darfur region of western Sudan, which lies on the border with Chad.
Sudanese army and police were barricading the town of El Geneina, near the border, to prevent any attack by Chadian troops, and there were concerns a column of the feared government-allied janjaweed moving toward the town as reinforcements, a U.N. official said.
The situation in Darfur is deteriorating quickly “mainly because of the re-emergence of the janjaweed militias who seemed to have been re-supplied and rearmed, and have been carrying out nefarious activities with impunity,” the African Union peacekeeping mission said in a statement Friday.
The A.U. said it had investigated and confirmed multiple attacks on refugees by janjaweed and Sudanese government troops, as well as rebel attacks. It said it condemned these cease-fire violations in the “strongest terms.”
The Chadian military was fighting Chadian rebels in the border area of Tendelti, 20 kilometers north west of El Geneina, said a U.N. official in Darfur, speaking on condition of anonymity because he wasn’t authorized to speak to the press.
Chad confirmed that it had sent troops into Sudan to pursue rebels who fled fighting with the military earlier in the week in eastern Chad.
“Government forces have used their right of pursuit to cross the border into Sudan,” the Chadian government said in a statement.
The communications minister met with Sudan’s ambassador Friday and demanded Khartoum hand over the rebels. “Chad has not declared war to Sudan and has no intention of doing so,” the government statement quoted Chadian minister Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor as saying.
The fighting reflected the complicated nature of the Darfur crisis, which has threatened to spill over into a regional conflict.
For nearly four years, Sudanese troops and the Arab janjaweed have been fighting Darfur’s ethnic African rebels, who revolted against what they saw as decades of neglect and discrimination by the Khartoum government.
U.N. and A.U. officials have accused the government of arming the janjaweed and coordinating attacks with them – a charge Khartoum denies. The janjaweed is blamed for widespread atrocities.
More than 200,000 people have been killed and 2.5 million driven from their homes in the conflict.
At the same time, the government of Chadian President Idriss Deby has been battling Chadian rebels since 2005. The rebels launched a failed attack on the capital, N’djamena, in April and have established bases in Darfur. The governments of Chad and Sudan trade accusations of each supporting the other’s rebels – and each side denies the charges.
The U.N. official said between 1,000 and 2,000 Chadian rebels had fled to their bases in Darfur, near El Geneina, after a bloody battle a week ago near Biltine, 150 kilometers across the border in Chad.
He didn’t know how many Chadian troops had entered Darfur to pursue them but said the number was “significant.” It wasn’t clear when the troops crossed the border, which is badly defined in many parts of the barren area.
The U.N. official said that “all nonessential staff” had been asked to leave El Geneina.
However, no full evacuation had been activated in the town. Most of the U.N. and aid workers were being asked to leave on end-of-the-year holidays as a precaution, the U.N. and aid groups said.
“It’s just a preventive measure, because there’s a lot of tension,” said Dawn Blalock, the spokeswoman at the U.N.’s office for the coordination of humanitarian affairs.
The exact number of people leaving wasn’t known Friday. While some aid groups said they were relocating their entire staff, Blalock said she expected some 200 U.N. and aid workers to remain in El Geneina, the capital of West Darfur province.
About 140 U.N. staff, diplomats and aid workers have recently pulled out of the North Darfur capital of El Fasher.
Nearly four million Darfur civilians rely completely or partially on international aid to survive, U.N. officials have said, adding that the violence is preventing relief from reaching more than a hundred thousand people in need.
So far in December, 250 humanitarian workers have been forced to evacuate their posts in various parts of Darfur, leaving some 500,000 people with little access to aid in the vast, arid region nearly the size of Texas, a coalition of international aid groups said in a statement Friday.
“If the (security) deterioration is allowed to continue, the impact on civilians could be devastating,” said in the statement Paul Smith-Lomas, from the U.K. aid group Oxfam.
Violence has only worsened in Darfur since the government signed a peace agreement with one rebel group in May, but Khartoum opposes a Security Council plan to replace the overwhelmed African Union peacekeeping force in the region with some 20,000 U.N. peacekeepers.
E.U. leaders expressed “deep concern” about Darfur at a summit Friday, but stopped short of taking any action against the Sudanese government for resisting the deployment of U.N. peacekeepers.
(AP)