Chad must change stance against U.N. force – Amnesty
April 4, 2007 (DAKAR) — Chad’s government is failing in its duty to protect civilians in its violence-torn east and must drop its opposition to the deployment of a robust U.N. military force there, Amnesty International said on Wednesday.
The British-based rights group criticised the position of President Idriss Deby’s government days after Chad reported at least 65 civilians were killed in a weekend cross-border raid by Sudanese militia which destroyed two eastern villages.
Sudan, which rejects Chadian charges it supports anti-Deby rebels, has denied any role in Saturday’s attacks against Tiero and Marena villages, in which the raiders fired at random on civilians, according to testimony from villagers who fled.
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon recommended in January sending an up to 11,000-strong peacekeeping force to Chad and Central African Republic to secure their porous borders with Sudan’s Darfur, where tens of thousands of people have been killed in a rebellion and related ethnic conflict since 2003.
But Chad has said it only wants a civil protection force of police and gendarmes in the east, where more than 220,000 Sudanese refugees from Darfur are also sheltering in camps.
“The Chadian government is clearly failing in its duty to protect its civilians affected by conflict in eastern Chad,” Tawanda Hondora, a deputy director in the Africa programme of Amnesty International, said in a statement sent to Reuters.
“Chad must immediately permit the deployment of a United Nations force which is adequately resourced and possessing a robust mandate to protect civilians,” Hondora added.
Survivors of the weekend attacks, cited by the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR, described the raiders as Janjaweed militia allied with Sudanese government forces in Darfur.
Amnesty, which said the raids killed at least 25 people, quoted Chad’s government as saying Chadian Arabs also took part.
Hondora described the security situation in east Chad as “dire” and accused the Janjaweed, whose name in Arabic loosely translates as “devils on horseback”, of “deliberate targeting, killing, rape and forced displacement of entire communities”.
He said the Chad violence was intimately connected with the crisis in Darfur, where Sudan is refusing to allow the deployment of a strong U.N. force to bolster an over-stretched African Union peacekeeping contingent.
“Obviously, a long-term resolution to the crisis in Chad will only be possible when there is a complete cessation of hostilities between the government and armed opposition groups and when the crisis in Darfur is resolved,” Hondora said.
“But civilians in Chad cannot wait for this to happen — the international community must take action,” he added.
(Reuters)