Chad accuses Sudan of preparing new attack

17 April 2006 (N’DJAMENA) — The Chad government on Monday accused neighbouring Sudan of forming a new rebel army to attack the country, but withdrew a threat to expel 200,000 Sudanese refugees.

Chadian Foreign Minister Ahmat Allami claimed the Sudanese government was “reforming a new army” to attack Chad, after the failure of an assault by insurgents on the capital N’Djamena last week.

“Preparations are under way on the other side of the border. The Sudanese are reforming a new army… The Sudanese are preparing a new massacre,” Allami told AFP by telephone.

Chad broke off diplomatic relations with Sudan last Friday, a day after the attack on N’Djamena by the rebel United Front for Change (FUC), which is seeking to topple President Idriss Deby Itno.

N’Djamena accused Sudan of arming the FUC rebels — a charge Khartoum denies — and threatened to retaliate by expelling the 200,000 refugees from the civil war in Sudan’s western Darfur region now living in camps in Chad.

But on Monday the United Nations refugee chief Antonio Guterres said Deby had assured him that “refugees will not be refouled (forcibly returned) and Chad will abide by international principles”.

Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said he had spoken to Deby on Sunday “in the framework of our efforts to guarantee the protection of refugees from Sudan’s Darfur region in Chad.”

“President Deby expressed his understandable concern about the difficulties involved in providing security both to the refugees and to the humanitarian organisations that are helping them,” he said in a statement.

Chad has been a co-mediator in the effort to bring peace to Darfur, where three years of fighting between rebels and Khartoum-backed militias have left up to 300,000 people dead and two million displaced.

But N’Djamena considers the Darfur conflict to be the main destabilising force in Chad, and views the refugee camps in the east of the country as recruitment “reservoirs” for the FUC rebels.

Ana Liria-Franch, the UNHCR representative in N’Djamena, confirmed to AFP that rebels have used the camps to recruit fighters, both forcibly and through financial inducements.

On Sunday Chad withdrew its delegation from the Darfur peace talks between the Khartoum government and the rebels in Abuja (Nigeria), in a further sign of tension between the two countries.

The Chad government’s withdrawal of its threat to expel the Darfur refugees follows its decision Sunday to push back the date for halting its oil production.

It had threatened to shut down its oil production on Tuesday if it did not receive 100 million dollars worth of oil revenues from a United States-led consortium held in an account in Britain’s Citibank.

But government spokesman Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor said Sunday N’Djamena had agreed to delay turning off the taps over the row until the end of April to allow the US time to resolve the situation.

N’Djamena said Friday it had repelled a rebel offensive after three hours of heavy fighting on the outskirts of the capital that left around 150 people dead, and that the fighting was over.

Allami said the rebels had “scattered across the country” and was no longer a threat.

Nonetheless, military sources told AFP on Monday that the Chad army’s only combat helicopter had been brought down by rebel gunfire over the weekend in the Sarh region, 500 kilometres (310 miles) south of N’Djamena.

Fuc has launched offensives in several parts of the country in the past few days, and outbreaks of tension were reported in several areas of the country on Monday.

(ST/AFP)