UN urged to help contain Darfur spillover
Nov 8, 2006 (DAKAR) — Sudan’s Darfur conflict risks mushrooming into a region-wide crisis and the U.N. should consider intervening in Chad and Central African Republic to contain the spillover, analysts and humanitarian groups say.
The western Sudanese region of Darfur, torn by a political and ethnic war since 2003, borders directly with these two central African states and recent events show violence by a myriad of armed groups increasingly rippling over their borders.
Last week, rebels opposed to President Francois Bozize in Central African Republic seized a remote northeast town near the frontier with Sudan’s Darfur, where Sudanese government forces and feared Arab militias battle local non-Arab rebels.
In southeast Chad in the last week, ethnic violence between Arab and non-Arab communities killed more than 100 people.
“It’s clearly what we’ve been complaining about for months, the war spilling over into Chad, the same crazy dynamic taking root there,” Olivier Bercault, a Chad expert with Human Rights Watch, told Reuters.
The leaders of Chad and Central African Republic blame Sudan’s Arab-led government, accusing it of “exporting genocide” from Darfur by arming rebels and raiders and sending them over the border to destabilise neighbouring non-Arab states.
Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir denies this. But he is resisting intense international pressure to accept a U.N. Security Council resolution for the deployment of more than 20,000 U.N. peacekeeping troops in Darfur.
Such a force would also try to secure Sudan’s porous borders with Chad and Central African Republic.
Some analysts say the U.N. should look beyond a narrow focus on the blocked Darfur deployment and move immediately to staunch the violence seeping into these two landlocked, unstable states.
“I really see this as a cluster of problems that need to be addressed as a sub-regional crisis,” said Suliman Baldo, a central Africa expert with the New York-based International Centre for Transitional Justice (ICTJ).
“Since the U.N. are unable to deploy in Darfur, they should deploy in Chad and Central African Republic to arrest the spread of this regional crisis,” said Baldo. The ICTJ helps countries to seek accountability for atrocities and human rights abuses.
CRUCIBLE OF VIOLENCE
With conflict flaring along and inside their borders with Sudan, the governments of Chad and Central African Republic are clamouring for U.N. action.
“Sudan is refusing (a U.N. force), but it’s Chad that’s paying the biggest price … For Chad, every lost minute affects human lives,” Chadian presidency spokesman Dieudonne Djonabaye told Reuters.
U.N. head of peacekeeping Jean-Marie Guehenno is sending a mission to Chad and Central African Republic to consider deploying U.N. forces in both countries.
“We’ve been asking for this for months. I only hope they won’t be arriving too late,” said one humanitarian official who works in eastern Chad. He asked not to be named.
He said in addition to more than 200,000 Darfur refugees sheltering in camps in eastern Chad, around 65,000 Chadians had been forced from their homes this year by violence.
Chad says the wave of raids across its eastern frontier by Sudanese Arab Janjaweed militia is destroying the peaceful co-existence of its own Arab and non-Arab communities.
“Many of the Janjaweed are of Chadian origin,” said ICTJ’s Baldo. The spate of rebellions, raids and feuds were closely inter-linked, turning the Chad-Sudan-Central African Republic tri-border region into a crucible of violence, he said.
Central African Republic officials say the rebel raiders who captured the northeast town of Birao more than a week ago include Chadians and former comrades in arms of President Bozize, who seized power in 2003 with help from Chadian fighters.
(Reuters)