Darfur conflict bleeds across the border into Chad
By Edmund Sanders
June 10, 2006 (DJAWARA, Chad) — There was no time for grave markers. But around some of the dirt mounds, the victims’ shoes were laid out neatly like slippers beside a bed.
Wild animals had unearthed body parts and human bones from the hastily dug mass graves. As local elder Abdullah Aziz Ibrahim walked through the pasture, he held his breath against the stench.
“They killed us one by one,” he said. He stooped over the grave of one former neighbor to try to cover the man’s exposed skull with branches and leaves.
The Darfur conflict in neighboring Sudan is bleeding across the border into Chad, and the massacre in Djawara, where 117 people are believed to have died in April, is the most gruesome evidence yet.
Scenes like this are common in western Sudan, but around here no one can remember anything similar. Tribesmen and aid workers say the tribes of eastern Chad have lived in relative harmony for years, with the occasional skirmishes over cattle and water.
But as world leaders push for peace in Darfur and the United Nations is hoping to deploy peacekeepers, the militias known as janjaweed have started using the same terror tactics here, stealing cattle, and killing or displacing thousands of civilians, say displaced Chadians, aid workers and local government officials.
The violence started spreading into Chad late last year, but since March it has occurred deeper in Chad and become increasing deadly. The number of militant groups on all sides of the conflict is growing.
About 50,000 Chadians have abandoned their homes and are living in camps, often next to refugees from Darfur, which puts further pressure on international aid efforts. Violence in some border towns has become so intense that, for the first time, several thousand Chadians have fled into Darfur.
Most alarming to many here, the Sudanese janjaweed, which reportedly have been supported by the Sudanese government in Khartoum, are radicalizing related tribes in Chad and luring them to participate in attacks by promising a share of the stolen land and cattle, Chadian officials, displaced civilians and aid workers say. The conflict on both sides of the border pits tribes who view themselves chiefly as Arabs against those who think of themselves as black or African.
“They are instigating the Arabs here,” said Moussa Mustafa, a Chad-based military leader with the Sudanese Liberation Army, one of the Darfur rebel groups fighting the Sudanese government.
“Now we have a Chadian janjaweed,” said Seid Brahim, the local sultan in Goz Beida.
Victims of recent violence in Chad say some attackers appear to be Sudanese, but they insist that local tribes are also participating.
“We know them well,” said Fizanie Mahmat, 45, whose husband was killed during a major offensive in March near the border in the district of Modeyna. “We grew up together and see them in the market. We all used to live in harmony. But the janjaweed from Sudan have changed them.”
Most of the attacks in southeastern Chad target one tribe, the Dadjo.
“They are only stealing from people who have black skin,” said Hassoun Idrisse, 32, a chief of Modeyna. “They want to make Chad an Arab country.”
The brutality of the attacks has shocked Dadjo leaders.
When horsemen surrounded Djawara, about 40 miles west of the border with Sudan, villagers had just finished prayers and were resting under the trees. Several hundred attackers began rounding up cattle and ransacking huts, witnesses said.
Most women and children escaped, but a large group of the men, armed only with thin spears, were chased to a nearby pasture, where they tried to hide in the trees. The bullet-riddled body of one man remained tangled in a treetop until it finally dropped to the ground recently, witnesses said.
After the attack, a dozen Djawara men were taken prisoner and forced to carry the bodies of dead janjaweed fighters to a hiding place at a mountain base several miles away, survivors said. They think the men were killed, but their bodies have not been recovered.
The pasture was the biggest of several battlegrounds around Djawara. Frightened villagers waited 12 days before returning to the pasture, which they found littered with spent cartridges, 42 decomposing bodies and leather amulets worn by the victims to ward off evil spirits. Fearful of another attack, they quickly turned the pasture into a makeshift cemetery, burying as many as a dozen victims in a grave.
Villagers say 117 people are dead or missing and presumed dead. Most Djawara survivors say they are still too afraid to return to the village to properly bury their relatives. They have sought refuge in a village several miles away.
“If I went to his grave, they’d kill me too,” said Khalima Mohammed Hami, speaking of her husband, whose grave had been dug up by animals.
Similar attacks have been documented closer to the border: in Modeyna in March, and in villages near Djawara in early April. Dadjo leaders accuse a few “African” tribes of joining the “Arab” alliance, either out of fear or a desire to share in the spoils.
In many ways, the attacks in Chad mirror those in Darfur, where rebel groups rose up against the Sudanese government in Khartoum in 2003 after years of marginalization. The government responded by unleashing a counter-insurgency, which eventually developed into the janjaweed. The government denies that it backed the militias.
More than 180,000 people are believed to have died in the Darfur conflict and 2 million have been displaced, including 200,000 who fled to Chad. The Bush administration calls the conflict in Darfur genocide.
Aid workers and political analysts say the violence and displacement in eastern Chad and western Sudan are so intertwined that any move to solve the Sudan conflict must include Chad. Focusing solely on Darfur may only aggravate the conflict in Chad, they say.
“This whole thing could easily just pop over into Chad,” said Lyndell Findlay, chief of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees office in Goz Beida, home to 12,000 displaced Chadians and 17,400 Darfur refugees. “Chad could become a free-for-all.”
A U.N. Security Council delegation will visit Goz Beida this weekend. Chadian President Idriss Deby wants the U.N. to deploy peacekeepers in Chad as well as in Sudan to ensure that the violence doesn’t shift into his country.
The government of Chad, one of the world’s poorest countries, has been unable to handle the growing emergency. Deby has been distracted by an internal rebel movement that includes former military officials.
Deby, who accuses the government in Khartoum of backing the rebels, is facing one of the biggest threats to his 16-year-old regime. Sudan, in turn, has accused Deby of sheltering the Darfur rebels.
In April, members of the United Front for Democracy and Change entered Chad through Sudan and made it across the vast country to the capital, N’Djamena, before they were stopped. The rebels launched another attack against the border town of Tine last weekend. The Chadian military is massing forces along the border in anticipation of another attack.
The troop movements, which began in December, are designed to shore up government institutions and military bases but have left much of the population without police or military protection, clearing the way for militias to operate with impunity.
Eastern Chad has become home to a dizzying collection of militants, including Sudanese janjaweed, Chadian janjaweed, Chadian rebels and Sudanese rebel groups such as the Sudanese Liberation Army. All sides have been accused of launching attacks on civilians.
“Everybody is running everywhere and everybody is attacking everybody,” the UNHCR’s Findlay said.
Brahim, the local sultan in Goz Beida who is also a leader of the Dadjo tribe, said his people deserved better.
“The government is not doing anything to stop these attacks,” Brahim said. He noted that there had been no arrests in the Djawara massacre.
Late last month, Chadian soldiers rebuffed a small janjaweed attack in the town of Dogdore, where many Djawara villagers had sought shelter. One wounded attacker was taken to a Goz Beida hospital, witnesses told an aid group, but local leaders say there have been no attempts to arrest or question the man.
From his hospital bed, Abakar Mohammed, 40, denied taking part in the attack.
“What janjaweed? I’ve never seen janjaweed,” he said. “There are no problems here. There is no fighting. We all get along.”
Humanitarian groups who went to eastern Chad in 2004 to assist Darfur refugees are now grappling with displaced Chadians as well.
“It’s putting a lot of strain on our resources,” said Nitesh Patel, head of the World Food Program’s office in Goz Beida.
In just three months, nearly 12,000 Chadians have settled on farmland about a mile outside town, not far from the Djabel camp for more than 17,000 Sudanese refugees. There is not enough water to supply the two camps and the local population, stirring tension and resentment. Women from the camps are spending up to nine hours a day fetching water in buckets.
Soon the rainy season will begin, flooding the farmland and heightening the risk of malaria and other diseases.
Aid groups had resisted providing free food and supplies to the Chad population, fearful that they would encourage them to become dependent on aid and create permanent camps. They are attempting to scatter families into small villages and offering them plots of farmland on which to support themselves.
But the situation is deteriorating. The World Food Program this month began its first major distribution of seeds and food baskets.
“We are in a situation now where if we don’t give them food, they won’t have anything to eat,” Patel said.
The people in the camps, many of whom have moved three or four times to flee attacks in the last four months, are reluctant to relocate.
“We’d rather stay here,” said Mohammed Seid, 32, a camp leader. “We’re tired of moving.”
(Los Angeles Times)