Date: 02/07/2008
After three days of fierce fighting between government troops and rebels here, most of the civilian dead had been carried off, mourned and buried by their families. But the dead rebels had been lying in the streets for days, abandoned by their fleeing compatriots, bloating amid black clouds of flies. Even the soldiers held their noses.
“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.
“Everything is back to normal,” Mr. Abdoulaye said.
Chad’s president, Idriss Déby, dressed in military fatigues with five stars pinned to his chest, was in a jubilant mood as he declared at a news conference at the presidential palace on Wednesday that “we have control, not only of the capital but of the whole country.”
But other remnants of the battle that nearly toppled Chad’s government last weekend will not be wiped away so easily. The clash has heightened tensions between Chad and Sudan, threatening to pull the two neighbors deeper into each another’s vexing problems.
Both countries accuse the other of fomenting rebellions across their shared border, and now that Sudanese rebels who had previously been focused on their own struggle in the western Sudanese province of Darfur have come to the aid of Mr. Déby, it has added fuel to the cross-border enmity.
Such international alliances and rivalries increase the chances that the entire region could fall into a vast and uncontrolled conflict like the one that engulfed the Great Lakes region of Central Africa after the Rwandan genocide — something diplomats and activists have been hoping to avoid.
More immediately, the long-sought, international peacekeeping missions in both countries have struggled to deploy given the new violence here in Chad and the Sudanese government’s stalling tactics in Darfur, plunging the fates of more than 2.5 million refugees on both sides of the border into even greater uncertainty.
“The war for Chad is not over,” wrote Alex de Waal, a scholar who specializes in Sudan and Chad at the Social Science Research Council, on his blog, Making Sense of Darfur. “It is likely to become more bloody and involve a wider humanitarian disaster before any solutions can be grasped.”
Even as Mr. Déby played host France’s minister of defense, who flew in to lend support to the beleaguered Chadian government and visit French troops based here, the rebels who attacked Ndjamena said that they were regrouping, rearming and planning a new assault.
Mr. Déby once again accused Sudan of using Chadian rebels as proxies to try to topple his government and install a client state.
“It is not a rebellion,” Mr. Déby said of the alliance of armed groups aimed at deposing him, one of which is led by his nephew, calling them “mercenaries used by Sudan.”
John Prendergast, a former Clinton Administration official and anti-genocide advocate who has worked in Chad and Sudan for 20 years, said that Sudan has been actively trying to overthrow Mr. Deby 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. “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 of the Darfur rebel group the Justice and Equality Movement on the battlefield to help defend Mr. Déby’s government.
Chad’s crisis has often been seen as extension of the conflict in Darfur, but those who study the region argue that in some ways the reverse is true, and that the fates of Chad and Darfur, which share a long, porous border and many of the same ethnic splits and political problems, have long been intertwined.
Many of the problems that led to the conflict in Darfur originated in Chad, according to Mr. de Waal. The first janjaweed, the fearsome Arab militias used by the government to fight the rebels in Darfur, were actually Chadian Arabs, he said, and some of the figures who would later become central to the non-Arab rebel groups in Darfur fought in Chad’s army at one time.
As dawn arrived for the second time here without a grim soundtrack of bullets and bombs, people hesitantly trickled out of hiding and onto the dusty streets of the capital Wednesday, searching for food, water, fuel and news. But little was available. Most shops remained shuttered, except the many that were burned or picked clean by looters amid the fighting.
“We are all hungry and there is nothing in the market,” said Pauline Bagamla, who was scooping water out of a city fountain, hoping to find some rice or manioc to cook in it. “I am hoping someone brings us something to eat.”
Those who ventured out for the first time since the fighting began on Saturday found a ruined city. The mirrored glass façade of a government building known as the People’s Palace was a jagged grimace of menacing shards. Bullet holes pitted the offices of the nation’s top court and its ministry of mines. A trickle of people returning to Ndjamena across the two bridges connecting Cameroon to Chad turned into a steady stream by afternoon. The United Nations said about 20,000 people had fled the fighting, and about half were living out in the open near the Cameroonian border town of Kousseri. The conditions were so miserable many opted to take their chances and come home.
“We could not find anywhere to sleep, so what could we do,” said Martine Nailibi, who was crossing back to Chad from Cameroon, followed by a gaggle of nine barefoot children, each toting a pot or pan, blanket or bundle. “We just pray the fighting does not start again.”
The city’s hospitals were chocked with bullet-riddled patients, many of whom had waited days to seek medical attention. At one hospital, a young woman arrived in the back of a taxi, barely conscious and wrapped in cloth. She had been wounded several days earlier in the fighting, said Dr. Claire Rieux of the aid group Doctors Without Borders.
“Now there is a very serious risk of infection,” Dr. Rieux said. “Many were too afraid to come.”
After days of defending the presidential palace from a rebel assault, Chad’s army demonstrated its firm grip on the capital 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 nine,” one of the other soldiers said with a laugh. “No, he is fourteen.”
Asked if the boy had seen combat, his older compatriot grabbed his automatic weapon and smiled, saying, “he can handle this and heavy weapons too.”
A Human Rights Watch report released last year said that many children across Chad were being pressed into fighting, either with the rebels or the army.
Mr. Déby, who took power in a military coup in 1990, has tried to frame the rebellion against him as purely a mercenary operation orchestrated by Sudan and made up of opportunists. But Chad, a country that has not known a peaceful transfer of power between rulers in its nearly five decades as an independent country, has plenty of problems of its own.
It remains one of the world’s poorest and least developed countries despite earning billions of dollars in oil revenues in the past few years, and its government is viewed as one of the most corrupt in Africa. Opposition politicians boycotted the last presidential election, in 2006, and in the last few days leading opposition figures have been rounded up and arrested. Human rights organizations expressed concerns that they would be tortured or killed.
Asked why politicians had been arrested, Mr. Déby replied, “I am here to save my country. I don’t occupy myself with such details.”
