Chad refuses UN advance peacekeeping mission
March 6, 2007 (UNITED NATIONS) — Chad, which has rejected any U.N. troops to deal with spillover from the conflict in Darfur, has now refused to allow an advance team of military, police and civilian peacekeepers to visit the country, a U.N. official said on Tuesday.
Last month, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recommended peacekeeping operations of up to 11,000 soldiers and police in Chad and the Central African Republic to staunch the violence spilling over from the Darfur conflict in neighboring Sudan.
Eastern Chad has 232,000 Sudanese refugees and 120,000 of its own citizens chased from villages in Darfur, mainly by government-armed Janjaweed guerrillas. Sudan and Chad support each other’s rebels and in Chad, an insurgency last year sought to topple President Idriss Deby.
Hedi Annabi, an assistant secretary-general for peacekeeping, told reporters he had been in contact with Chad’s U.N. ambassador about the new visit “and the response is that for the time being Chad would not wish to see the deployment of the advance mission.”
Officials in Chad, a central African oil producing nation, have opposed a U.N. military presence, especially in areas where it is fighting an insurgency, preferring police only.
The U.N. mission of some 100 military, police and civilians was to talk to the government and lay the groundwork for a larger operation, if Deby approved. The Security Council in January approved the advance mission that would “accelerate preparations for an early decision on the possible deployment of a multidimensional presence in those countries.”
“I suspect that since they still have a hesitation about the peacekeeping operation, they see the advance mission as anticipating a future development,” Annabi told reporters after briefing the 15-member Security Council.
“We need a military force that creates an environment in which the police can do their work,” Annabi said, adding that police would not be able to operate without security.
France, the former colonial power in Chad, has an air force contingent of 3,000 now in the country.
The United Nations has run into trouble in fielding any peacekeepers in the region, with Sudan not giving the final go-ahead for an interim force to bolster 7,000 African Union troops with some 3,000 personnel, mainly engineers, logistics and medical units as well as helicopter pilots.
(Reuters)