MUSLIM HATE IN CHAD
NDJAMENA - Ethnic fighting between rival mobs of Muslim and non-Muslim residents killed 12 people and injured another 16 in the south Chadian town of Bebedjia, the country's defence minister said on Monday. Bebedjia lies about 35 km from Chad's oilfields at Doba, the largest private sector investment ever undertaken in Africa, which have been pumping crude oil for the last year.
Residents in the town, most of whose inhabitants are Christian or practise traditional African religions, say its proximity to the oil project has attracted people looking for jobs, notably nomadic Muslims from the north of Chad. "A dispute between a trader and a customer escalated," Defence Minister Emmanuel Naringar told IRIN from the town, 600 km south of the capital, Ndjamena.
Officials and aid workers said the violence had flared on Wednesday when a young trader belonging to the Ngambaye ethnic group, dominant in the south-western region of the country, refused to sell a bag to a Muslim from the north. Their fight then sucked in other members of their communities.
"The events were so violent the government could not wait," the minister said. "We came rapidly to calm things down, restore state authority, reassure the people and make sure peaceful coexistence remains a reality in the area." Another witness in the town said on Monday that several houses and part of the market had been burnt down during the clashes and some families had been forced to seek shelter at the town's hospital and church.
Yorongar Ngarledji, the town's representative in parliament and a member of the opposition, put the death toll much higher, saying 33 people had in fact been killed. "This is what happens because of the difficulty of cohabitation between the indigenous population who are Christian farmers and the Muslim herdsmen," Ngarledji told IRIN.
Eleyakim Vanambyl, a journalist for a Doba-based radio station, said last week's violence was not the first such incident in the area and that similar tensions had erupted a month ago in the nearby village of Bikou, although no-one was killed.
Source:Ocnus.net 2004
Darfur violence spreads across border to Chad
Marauding Arab gunmen drive at least
20,000 from their homes.
The New York Times Tuesday,
February 28, 2006
ADRE, Chad - The chaos in Darfur, the war-ravaged region in Sudan where more than 200,000 civilians have been killed, has spread across the border into Chad, deepening one of the world's worst refugee crises.
Arab gunmen from Darfur have pushed across the desert, stealing cattle, burning crops and killing anyone who resists. The lawlessness has driven at least 20,000 Chadians from their homes, turning them into refugees in their own country.
Hundreds of thousands more people in this area, along with 200,000 Sudanese who fled here for safety, now find themselves caught up in a growing conflict between Chad and Sudan, two nations with a long history of violence and meddling in each other's affairs.
"You may have thought the terrible situation in Darfur couldn't get worse, but it has," Peter Takirambudde, executive director of the Africa division of Human Rights Watch, said in a recent statement. "Sudan's policy of arming militias and letting them loose is spilling over the border, and civilians have no protection from their attacks, in Darfur or in Chad."
Indeed, the accounts of civilians in parts of eastern Chad are agonizingly familiar to those in western Sudan. One woman, Zahara Isaac Mahamat, described how Arab men on camels and horses had raided her village in Chad, stealing everything they could find and slaughtering all who resisted.
The dead included her husband, Ismail Ibrahim, who tried to prevent the raiders from burning his sorghum and millet fields. Like so many others in this desolate expanse of dust-choked earth, she fled west with her three children, much as people in Darfur have been forced to do in recent years.
"I have lost everything but my children," she said, her face looking much older than her 20 years. She is now a refugee, with thousands of other displaced Chadians, in Kolloye, a village south of here. "We have three bowls of grain left," she said. "When that is gone, only God can help us."
The spreading chaos is a result of two closely connected conflicts in the neighboring countries:
In Darfur, government forces and the janjaweed, Arab militias aligned with the government, have been battling rebels in a campaign of terror that the Bush administration has called genocide.
The U.N Security Council has agreed to send troops to protect civilians, but they will take months to arrive. In the meantime, President Bush has said, NATO should help shore up a failing African Union peacekeeping mission there, but a surge of violence has chased tens of thousands of people from their homes in recent weeks.
In Chad, the government is fighting its own war against rebels based in Sudan and bent on removing Chad's ailing president, Idriss Deby, from power.
The rebels include disgruntled soldiers who defected and tribes tired of being ruled by members of the president's tribe, the Zaghawa, who represent just a small percentage of the population but who have long dominated politics and the military.
In a sign of how inseparable the two conflicts have become, Deby has accused Sudan of supporting the rebellion against his government, and Sudan has long suspected members of Deby's family of supporting Zaghawa-led rebels in Darfur.
Both sides agreed at a summit meeting in Libya in early February to stop supporting rebels on each other's territory and to tone down the belligerent talk. But Chadian rebels have remained on the Sudanese side of the border, and it is not clear whether Deby has the capacity to stop members of his clan from supporting Darfur rebels.
If unchecked by international intervention, this complex and volatile mix of government forces, allied militias and at least a half-dozen rebel groups in a remote region awash with weapons will almost inevitably lead to disaster, said John Prendergast, a senior adviser at the International Crisis Group, a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, and an expert on the Darfur conflict.
In Chad, the trouble began in December when rebel groups attacked Adre and two other strategic border towns. The Chadian army repelled the rebels, but it withdrew its troops from garrisons along the border to fortify Adre.
The withdrawal left a security vacuum for the janjaweed to rush into. The once well-traveled road between Adre, a bustling border town, and Kolloye has become a terrifying gantlet roamed by bandits and Arab militias. Dozens of villages have emptied; some have been burned. The few aid agencies working in this lawless region avoid the road, using a circuitous route farther west to reach Abeche, the regional capital.
At the hospital in Adre, the number of gunshot victims in December and January almost doubled, to about 100 a month, relief officials said, a sign of growing lawlessness.
In one ward lay Fatime Youma, 13, with a tube draining the gunshot wound that had punctured her lung.
She was shot, her father said, while looking for firewood with her 16-year-old sister, Zenab, who lay in the next room with a gunshot wound to her arm.
The man charged with defending Chad's border and protecting refugees and civilians is Gen. Abakar Youssouf Mahamat Itno, 38, a nephew of Deby who was dispatched here the day of the rebel attack.
"Sudan wants to export the war in Darfur to us here," Itno said at his camp in the hills above Adre. "They want to use the janjaweed they armed to terrorize Darfur, to terrorize our population. We will not allow it."
Even so, he acknowledged his inability to patrol the border areas. "It is a long border," he said. "We cannot be everywhere at once."