Chad says UN force could upset neighbours
May 28, 2007 (N’DJAMENA) — Chad’s government does not want a United Nations military peacekeeping force deployed in its violent east because it fears its neighbours may see these foreign troops as a threat, the prime minister said on Monday.
Speaking on French radio, Prime Minister Nouradine Delwa Kassire Coumakoye also ruled out opening peace talks with eastern Chadian rebels unless they first accepted the authority of President Idriss Deby’s government.
A U.N. mission is in Chad to try to persuade Deby to accept U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s recommendation for a robust U.N. military force to be sent to the eastern border to halt violence spilling over from Sudan’s conflict-torn Darfur region.
Humanitarian groups say such a force is essential to protect around 234,000 Sudanese refugees and 120,000 Chadian civilians who have fled successive attacks by armed groups on both sides of the long, desolate and porous frontier.
But Chad’s government, which is battling an eastern rebellion by insurgents it says are supported by Sudan, has said it will only accept a U.N. police force, not a fully fledged military force of “blue helmet” peacekeepers.
“We don’t want green helmets or blue helmets. We don’t want war,” Coumakoye told Radio France Internationale (RFI).
“We don’t want to create an opportunity for our neighbours to think that we’ve brought in the forces of the international community to fight our adversaries,” he added.
Coumakoye, whom RFI said spoke while visiting Paris, did not mention which of Chad’s neighbours he was referring too.
But Sudan has for months been resisting international pressure to allow the proposed deployment of a large U.N. peacekeeping force in Darfur, where a rebellion and linked ethnic conflict have killed around 200,000 people since 2003.
Recently though, Khartoum has appeared to give ground on allowing the United Nations to bolster a struggling African Union peacekeeping mission in Darfur.
GADDAFI INFLUENCE
Diplomats and analysts say Chadian President Deby is also being influenced by Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, whom they say strongly objects to any Western-controlled multinational force being deployed in a country on his southern frontier.
Coumakoye said the Chadian government wanted the United Nations to support a police force, not troops, to protect the refugees, displaced civilians and humanitarian workers in eastern Chad.
“The U.N. should help us with resources,” he said.
The Chadian premier said the eastern rebels fighting a guerrilla war to topple Deby must first accept his rule for any political dialogue to be possible.
“If they agree to stop challenging our institutions, then of course we can dialogue with them,” he said.
Rebel leaders, who call Deby’s rule corrupt, inept and illegitimate, have demanded a national political dialogue to organise early elections to appoint a successor to him.
Deby, a former army commander who seized power through a 1990 revolt from the east, won re-election last year in polls which were boycotted as unfair by main opposition parties.
(Reuters)