And this, too, could have been predicted.
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 and entered Chad, stealing cattle, burning crops and killing anyone who resists. The lawlessness has driven at least 20,000 Chadians from their homes, making them refugees in their own country. Hundreds of thousands more people in this area, along with 200,000 Sudanese who fled here for safety, find themselves caught up in a growing conflict between Chad and Sudan, which have 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 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."
And I think God will have to, because nobody else seems to have both the political will and ability.
Bush has called for an additional 7,000 troops to be placed in the region, an implicit acknowledgement that the OAU plan for stabilizing the area hasn't worked, and was really unworkable to start with. But where does he plan to get the troops from? We most assuredly don't have them to give. Europe has seemed signally disinclined to send them. Asia seems similarly disinclined, and in any event, you need to be careful where in Asia or Africa, for that matter, the troops would come from. Adding Muslim troops would likely make the non-Muslims feel that the suppliers of the troops were taking sides, and the government of Sudan, at least, would seem to prefer Muslim troops, for that very same reason. And all that said, it doesn't matter, because Sudan refuses to allow UN troops in the country.
KHARTOUM, 23 Feb 2006 (IRIN) - Sudan has rejected the proposal to transform the African Union-led peacekeeping mission in the strife-torn western region of Darfur to a United Nations operation. "The government of Sudan strongly rejects the proposal of international forces to be deployed to Darfur and rejects the transition of operation in Darfur from AU to UN," Foreign Minister, Lam Akol, told a parliamentary session on Wednesday. "The UN has no mandate in Darfur, it is the AU that has the mandate there," he added.
On Monday, the Sudanese Foreign Ministry also issued a statement in which it said Jan Pronk, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary General in Sudan, was infringing on the country’s sovereignty. The UN envoy, during a news conference in Khartoum on Tuesday, strongly denied the accusations, however. "The UN is acting within its own mandate. We are not overstretching our mandate," Pronk stressed. "I have always been completely impartial."
Pronk stressed that the UN had never asked for a transition. He noted that the international organisation – with 14 existing operations - was reluctant to take on a new peace operation as it was already overstretched and lacked sufficient troops. However, if the AU would take the decision for the transition, Pronk said the UN had "the moral and political obligation to respond positively" because it was part of its mandate. The AU is expected to take a final decision during the next ministerial meeting of the Peace and Security Council, on 3 March....
Honestly, at the moment, it looks like the best outcome for Sudan would be for the government to be brought down, and for the country to be partitioned -- but who would maintain the partition? Who would build it? And heaven only knows what the best outcome for Chad would be; its government is scarcely less corrupt than Sudan's, if in a somewhat different way. It's got its own civil conflict, for all that it may be meddling in Sudan. (And what sort of damn fool government foments civil war in the country next door when it doesn't have control of the borders? Anyone with even the tiniest bit of common sense could tell you that it was going to blowback.)
Posted by iain at February 28, 2006 01:59 PM
