Darfur’s terrible export

07 June 2006

Peter Oborne reports from the battlefield on the Chad–Sudan border where Janjaweed bandits, armed with AK-47s, grenades and helicopter gunships, are ethnically cleansing local African tribesmen

This happy relationship only changed in February this year. ‘They came to visit us,’ said Hassan Younis, ‘and said they had reached an agreement with the Chadean rebels. They said we should join with them and the Janjaweed. They asked us to join with them to take power from President Deby. They said that if you refuse you are on the side of the government.’

Hassan Younis says his Arab neighbours went to the Sudan and came back with a lot of guns. He says, ‘They came back with strange faces we did not recognise.’ After he had rebuffed the offer of an anti-government alliance, the attacks began. There is no question that the Sudanese government is today sponsoring the ethnic cleansing of Chad, just as it has long sponsored mass murder in Darfur.

The national capital of N’Djamena is 500 miles away in Western Chad. There President Deby seems powerless to do anything about the bloodbath on his eastern border. His own position is threatened, he has few resources (though more since last month when the World Bank came to his rescue) and he can scarcely pay his own soldiers, some of whom have already defected to the rebels. Since the attacks last December he has hauled such troops as he can command into the major bases, above all into Adre. Most of the other garrisons are now empty, which is one reason that it is so easy for the Janjaweed to make their deadly incursions.

This weakness has forced President Deby into desperate measures. He has now granted the Sudanese Liberation Army — the militia which leads the resistance against the Khartoum government inside Darfur — safe haven within Chad. This represents a crucial change. When the SLA was formed three years ago, President Deby refused to meet them and at one stage sent his own army inside Sudan to fight the SLA, though his soldiers refused.