Sudan uses rebels to foil EU peace force – Chad
November 29, 2007 (N’DJAMENA) — Chad accused neighbour Sudan on Thursday of backing anti-government rebels to try to block the planned deployment of a European Union peacekeeping force in the east of the country.
Prime Minister Nouradine Delwa Kassire Coumakoye made the accusation at a news conference in the capital N’Djamena as Chad’s army fought rebels for control of a mountainous area near the Sudanese border, the latest in several days of clashes.
The fighting, which has shattered a month-old peace accord, has multiplied the risks for the EU peacekeeping mission, which is due to deploy early next year in eastern Chad with a United Nations mandate to protect refugees and aid workers there.
“(Sudanese President) Omar Hassan al-Bashir is losing sleep over the arrival of the U.N. and EU forces,” Coumakoye told reporters. “He wants to stop the force from coming, because he thinks this force, which will be on the Chadian border, constitutes a danger to him.”
Chad summoned the Sudanese ambassador this week to protest against the fighting, which included a major battle on Monday that the government and rebels both said killed hundreds.
Coumakoye said government forces had found Sudanese-supplied arms, munitions, vehicles and uniforms among the rebel Union of Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD) fighters they had killed or captured.
Sudan’s government routinely rejects Chadian accusations that it supports Chadian rebels fighting a 2-year-old insurgency against the 17-year-rule of President Idriss Deby.
The UFDD and another rebel group, the Assembly of Forces for Change (RFC), abandoned a month-old ceasefire at the weekend and accused Deby’s government of not honouring parts of a Libyan-brokered peace accord signed last month.
Coumakoye said the Chadian government considered the Oct. 25 peace accord signed with its main rebel foes still valid and he called on the insurgents, particularly the RFC led by Timane Erdimi, to embrace the peace deal.
“VIOLENT COMBAT”
Chad’s army said on Wednesday it had tracked down and destroyed fleeing remnants of the UFDD.
But UFDD leader Mahamat Nouri, a former defence minister who defected to join the anti-Deby rebellion, rejected what he called government “lies” and said fighting resumed on Thursday.
“There has been violent combat since 7 o’clock,” he told Radio France International (RFI), saying he was speaking from the battle zone in eastern Chad.
He said French aircraft, part of a French military contingent stationed in the landlocked former French colony under a bilateral defence treaty, were flying reconnaissance flights for the government over the rebel positions.
Chadian army sources, who asked not to be named, said an army column advanced from the town of Guereda and attacked the rebels in their mountain stronghold at Hadjer-Marfaine.
“We are chasing them towards the (Sudan) border,” one army source said. There was no independent confirmation of the fighting or information on casualties.
The EU force for Chad, which will include U.N. police and also send soldiers to northeast Central African Republic, will try to help contain a widening conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region which has pushed armed raiders and refugees across the border.
It will complement a bigger United Nations/African Union peacekeeping force planned for Darfur, where a political and ethnic conflict triggered by a 2003 rebellion has killed at least 200,000 people, experts say.
(Reuters)