Govt controls Chadian capital as French planes monitor eastern border

February 5, 2008 (NDJAMENA) — Chad’s forces loyal to President Idriss Deby controlled the capital and its immediate surroundings, while French military aircraft have been patrolling the Chad-Sudan border to ensure there has been no interference in the fighting around N’Djamena.

“Today, the city of Ndjamena is under (government) control, at least within a 10-kilometre (six-mile) radius,” French ambassador Bruno Foucher told reporters in Ndjamena. Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno had appeared “very confident” when they had last spoken Monday night, he added.

France’s defence minister said it wanted to monitor “any self-styled foreign intervention” in the fighting between Chad’s government and rebels.

France has 1,450 troops based in Chad and Paris sent an extra 150 troops to help evacuate foreign nationals.

At the same time French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Tuesday that France, with 1,450 troops and Mirage fighter jets stationed in Chad, was ready to “do its duty” and intervene if need be.
“Now there is a legal decision taken unanimously by the Security Council, and if Chad was the victim of an aggression, France could in theory have the means to oppose such action,” he said in the French coastal town of Aytre.

“Everyone needs to think carefully about this.”

His comments came in the wake of Monday’s unanimous Security Council statement, condemning the rebel assault and calling on UN nations to provide any support requested by the Chadian government. The document was drafted by French diplomats.

French Defence Minister, Herve Morin, stressed that the UN declaration on Monday calling on all countries to support the government had not changed the terms of engagement.

“What it does do is give international community support to the actions of France,” he told Radio France Internationale. “It is also support for [President] Idriss Deby.”

“It is international community support for the integrity of Chad and support for the actions of France, actions that we’ve been carrying out for several days.”

Mr Morin said that France did have a military agreement with Chad which provides for logistical, medical and training support, but “in no way is it a defence agreement… that would oblige France to intervene to protect the sovereignty of the country involved”.

The French military could intervene if it was authorised to do so by a UN resolution, he added.

However, Mr Morin admitted that French fighter jets and reconnaissance planes had been flying over the border with Sudan over the past 36 hours in line with a request from President Nicolas Sarkozy to ensure there are no foreign incursions.

“It enables us to monitor and verify any self-styled foreign interventions and to date we’ve seen nothing,” he said.

“What is certain is that these rebel forces were over by the Sudanese border,” he added. “What we might well find out in the days ahead is just what the involvement of the Sudanese actually is.”

The violence in the western Sudanese region of Darfur and the cross-border fighting between Chad and Sudan has in recent years sent at least 400,000 people fleeing to refugee camps in eastern Chad.

A French-dominated European Union peacekeeping force had been due to start deploying to eastern Chad last week to give the refugees and aid workers there a measure of protection, but the latest rebel offensive began at the same time.

The rebels themselves announced a ceasefire Tuesday, as refugees poured into neighbouring Cameroon and Nigeria,

“Aware of the suffering of the Chadian people … the forces of national resistance have given their agreement to an immediate ceasefire,” rebel spokesman Abderaman Koulamallah told AFP by satellite telephone.

Koulamallah said the tripartite rebel alliance wanted a ceasefire to be followed by dialogue, a peaceful resolution of the conflict and “the installation of a truly democratic political regime”.

But Deby’s Prime Minister Nourredine Delwa Kassire Coumakoye dismissed the announcement.

“Why a ceasefire? They don’t exist any more. With whom would we sign a ceasefire? … We’ve got them under control,” Coumakoye told the French global TV channel France 24.

Bodies, burned-out cars, trucks and motorcycles littered the streets.

On the dusty sun-baked streets of Ndjamena, AFP journalists saw soldiers patrolling in pickup trucks mounted with rockets and, in one case, an anti-aircraft machine gun.

Deby’s government has said its forces pushed the rebels from Ndjamena on Sunday after a weekend of heavy fighting that left dead bodies littering the dusty streets, shops and homes looted, the national radio station ransacked, and hospitals filled with wounded civilians.

But rebel leaders insisted they had made a strategic withdrawal, and on Monday ordered civilians to flee in anticipation of a fresh assault.

Chadian authorities on Tuesday evening urged the thousands of civilians who fled the fighting since Saturday to return since there was no longer a “threat”.

“We are asking our fellow citizens who have been worried and who were obliged to leave the capital to return immediately,” army General Mahamat Ali Abdallah said on national television, which was back on the air for the first time since Saturday.

In Geneva, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees said 15,000 to 20,000 Chadians had fled west into in Cameroon via the border town of Kousseri, 15 kilometres (10 miles) from Ndjamena.

“People are still coming through. It’s a continuous flow,” said UNHCR spokeswoman Helene Caux. Kousseri was “completely swamped” by refugees, some taken in by local inhabitants, others camping in the open air, she added.

Further north, another 3,500 refugees, mostly women, children and the elderly, had arrived in Nigeria, immigration officials and refugees said Tuesday.

But the fighting meant that the deployment of a mainly French 3,700-strong European Union military force in Chad remained suspended, although there is already an advance party of the EU force on the ground.

Their task will be to protect refugees from the Sudanese region of Darfur, over Chad’s eastern border, and from other parts of central Africa.

In Washington, White House spokesman Dana Perino described the violence as “a very troubling situation, and very serious, and we’ve got a lot of work to do to help resolve the situation.”

A Russian foreign ministry statement said it was “vital to quickly stabilise the situation in the African country to avoid the risks of extending the conflict into neighbouring states and the region as a whole.”

More than 1,000 foreigners, many of them French nationals, have meanwhile been evacuated from Ndjamena or are awaiting flights out.

(ST)

Some information for this report are provided by AFP and BBC