Jerome Delay/AP
Chadian rebels have left the capital N’Djamena and are heading back east towards Darfur, but it doesn’t look like the fighting will end anytime soon. The rebels, backed by the Bashir government in Sudan, have vowed to not give up their fight and are merely pulling back to regroup. Chad also supports rebels inside Sudan who are fighting government forces and the janjaweed — the same people who brought you the bloodbath in Darfur. Chadian President Idriss Deby came out in full military uniform to gloat over the victory and issued a carefully worded speech that seems designed to draw France into a conflict with Sudan. In a radio interview he said:
‘I issue a solemn call to the European Union, and to the initiator of this idea France, to ensure that this force comes to take up positions as soon as possible to alleviate the burden we are currently bearing,’ he told French radio station Europe 1. ‘The international community must help the Darfuris who are threatened in their very existence,’ Mr Deby said.
Yesterday’s NY Times article was better than today’s, it says:
“We are just cleaning the garbage off the streets of Ndjamena,” said Hassana Abdoulaye, the provincial governor, smiling as he watched a crew of firemen heave the corpses into a bright yellow front loader, which then tipped them into a dump truck headed for a mass grave. Just a few smears of dried blood remained.
Darfur rebels came to President Deby’s aid…
John Prendergast, a former Clinton administration official and antigenocide activist who has worked in Chad and Sudan for 20 years, said Sudan had been trying to overthrow Mr. Déby because of his support for Darfur rebel groups and his willingness to allow a European peacekeeping force to deploy in Chad to protect Darfur refugees living on the country’s eastern border with Sudan.“This has been an undeclared proxy war between Chad and Sudan for nearly four years now,” he said in an e-mail message. “The international community has largely turned a blind eye.”
Sudan has denied these accusations, and argues that it is Chad that is fomenting trouble in Sudan’s backyard by supporting rebels in Darfur, claims that were bolstered by the arrival on the battlefield of the Darfur rebel group the Justice and Equality Movement to help defend Mr. Déby’s government.
And then this:
After days of defending the presidential palace from a rebel assault, Chad’s army demonstrated its firm grip on the capital on Wednesday by sending truckloads of soldiers bristling with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades racing through the city at top speed. Among them were soldiers who appeared to be children.
At one checkpoint, a boy whose voice had not yet broken sat atop a pickup, his gun barely taller than he was, his red beret a loose fit on his small head.
“He is 9,” one of the other soldiers said with a laugh. “No, he is 14.”
Asked whether the boy had seen combat, his older compatriot grabbed his automatic weapon and smiled, saying, “He can handle this and heavy weapons too.”
France — and the rest of the world — is being forced to pick their poison. There’s the Bashir government in Sudan, who are some of the biggest scumbags of all time and are responsible for millions of deaths in the south of Sudan and hundreds of thousands in Darfur. Then there’s Deby in Chad, an oil robber baron type who uses children to keep himself in power.
In a region that’s all too familiar with war the aid community didn’t even have to set up new refugee camps, they just had to restock the old ones.
TAGS:
france,
war
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