Chad accuses Sudan of using its deserters to fight rebels
Nov 20, 2005 (N’DJAMENA) — Chad accused neighbouring Sudan on Sunday of deliberately trying to destabilise it by using Chadian army deserters who fled over the border to help fight rebels.
Sudanese troops and rebels clashed in heavy fighting on Saturday in Sudan’s western Darfur region, where Chad says scores of army deserters who fled their barracks in late September are sheltering.
“The Sudanese government is using the Chadian deserters in the fight against its armed opposition with disregard for the principles of (regional bloc) CENSAD and the African Union,” Chad’s government said in a statement seen by Reuters.
“The resumption of violence with deserters from the Chadian army at the side of Sudanese government forces constitutes a manifest desire to destabilise Chad, the principal mediator in the Darfur crisis,” it said.
Tens of thousands have been killed since a revolt began in Darfur in early 2003, heightening tensions with Chad as hundreds of thousands of refugees poured into its poor, arid east, putting immense pressure on already meagre resources.
The Chadian statement said a “coalition of Sudanese government forces and a group of Chadian deserters” had attacked the Sudanese Liberation Movement (SLM) in the mountainous Jabel Moun area of Darfur. It gave no date for the clash.
Sudanese forces said on Saturday they had attacked Chadian rebels who had crossed into Jabel Moun but one Darfur rebel group — the National Movement for Reform and Development — said neither account was true and that its bases were in fact the target.
The African Union, which has ceasefire monitors in Darfur, said there had been heavy fighting in the area and reported casualties but did not have any figures.
Chad, a former French colony itself racked by instability, has said it is prepared to pursue the army deserters, who have demanded that President Idriss Deby step down, inside Darfur.
The dissident soldiers, who call themselves the Platform for Change, National Unity and Democracy, deny that they have left Chadian territory and say they number around 800 men, more than a dozen of them senior officers.
Deby has dissolved his Republican Guard and reshuffled his remaining top officers since the wave of desertions, a move diplomats and analysts say is aimed at purging threats to his authority and ensuring the survival of his administration.
Gunmen attacked two army bases in a bid to steal weapons in the capital N’Djamena last Monday in what the government said appeared to be part of an attempted insurgency.
(Reuters)