15 Jan 2007: ISS Today: Chad Army, Rebels Dispute Control Of Remote Town

15 January 2007: Chad Army, Rebels Dispute Control Of Remote Town
Reuters

Chad’s army said on Sunday it had dislodged rebel forces from a remote town they captured on Saturday and was pursuing them through the desert, but the rebels insisted that they still held the town. The rebel Union Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD) occupied the remote northeastern town of Ounianga Kebir early on Saturday morning, opening up what a spokesman said was a new front designed to stretch government forces.

Pesident Déby’s dramatic reconciliation over the Christmas period with the leader of the rebel Front for Democratic Change (FUC) Mahamat Nour Abdelkerim might have led some observers to believe that the Chadian government in signing an agreement with rebel forces in the east of the country. But although the FUC had played a major part in the offensive that took rebels to the gates of the capital N’Djamena in April 2006, internal divisions within the organisation and resentment of Nour’s leadership style led to a split in the FUC and large-scale defections from its ranks in the second half of the year.

In October, Mahamat Nouri (not to be confused with the FUC leader) who had defected from government service and gone into rebellion in May managed to form a coalition of Gourane, Zaghawa and Arab rebel forces under the banner of the UFDD. Other rebel movements also continue to operate, but the latest attacks, in an area north of the main conflict zone bordering Darfur indicates that Déby faces continued difficulties and that his military forces will be further stretched.

Although the internal dynamic of Chadian politics is a troubled one, this conflict also has to be seen as representing the extension of the economics of violence centred on the greater Darfurian region. What happens in this context is that local grievances and disputes, fairly frequent in an area of jumbled and contested identities and ecological stress, find new and violent expression as the contagion of war spreads to undermine traditional methods of conflict resolution. Across the entire region more than 2 million people are now uprooted, their communities shattered by the depredations of raiding militias and “self-defence” groups.

By mid-2006, the UN Security Council, unable to make much headway in tackling the epicentre of the storm, in Sudan’s Darfur, began to consider deploying a mission into Chad. A technical assessment mission, however, was unable to enter eastern Chad for security reasons, nor was it able to make contact with representatives of the rebel groups. For his part, President Déby gave qualified approval for the deployment of UN force, but in a report issued on 22 December the departing Secretary General Kofi Annan, noting the limited scope or prospects for real dialogue and reconciliation between Déby’s government and its armed opponents, and the improbability of a political or military settlement in Darfur, opined that the deployment of a UN force would be too dangerous, as well as extremely expensive. Barring the consent of all parties, he added, a UN force was likely to be seen as partial to the government position, and concluded that in light of this consideration, the time was not right to constitute or deploy such a force.

Should the Security Council, nevertheless, proceed to explore the idea of establishing a multidimensional presence in eastern Chad comprising political, humanitarian, military and police components, the Secretary General advised that the military mission be a robust one capable of affording actual protection to civilians at risk.

On 10 January members of the UN Security Council agreed on the despatch of a new assessment mission to Chad and the Central African Republic, suggesting a measure of dissatisfaction with the December report. Whether the conclusions drawn after this assessment prove radically different, or how this fits with current plans for a hybrid UN/African Union mission in Darfur remains to be seen.

Richard Cornwell, African Security Analysis Programme, ISS Tshwane (Pretoria)