As the UN continues to dance around Sudanese sensibilities - bankrolling the African Union force there, but allowing Khartoum to block a UN troop deployment - it is clear that the Darfur crisis is spilling over the border into neighbouring Chad, already home to 200,000 Sudanese refugees.
After 10 days of escalating violence in its eastern regions, on Monday night the Chadian government declared a state of emergency. Governors were granted emergency powers, the press was muzzled and radios were banned. The catalyst was a series of ethnically motivated attacks in the south-east of the country, which the UN refugee agency says has claimed 200 lives.
So far, it appears both perpetrators and victims are Chadian. At the very best, these attacks are merely modelled on the Sudanese Janjaweed style of fighting: ethnic |
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The ethnic violence that has torn through Sudan is spilling into neighbouring Chad,
says
a s h smyth |
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Arab horseback militias attacking ethnic African villagers.
The Chad government, however, accuses Khartoum of encouraging the attacks "to weaken Chad by making different Chadian communities fight each other. All this is to prepare the ground for a large-scale war."
Is this really likely? Certainly there is no such thing as a local conflict anymore: in the globalised era, even small wars have regional effects. The UN should have realised this and ended the Darfur crisis long ago.
Meanwhile, Chad must think carefully about the necessity of its state of emergency. A media blackout is unlikely to offer any major benefits. Rather than being embarrassed by domestic problems, it should be trying to encourage international participation (including by the UN) in order to prevent an escalation in regional violence. 
FIRST POSTED NOVEMBER 15, 2006
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