Now President Deby is accusing Sudan of hiring mercenaries to overthrow his government; he is threatening to expel 200,000 Sudanese refugees. Sudan denies the accusation, and accuses Chad of supporting rebels in its Darfur region.
Who’s right? And why are Chad and Sudan on bad terms anyway? What do they have to fight over?
Chad and the Sudan have had bad relationships for a while. This is mostly due to the problems in Darfur…refugees from Darfur have been crossing over the border into Chad, which doesn’t really have the resources or desire to take care of them, and Sudanese militia involved in the Darfur conflict have been raiding over the border and attacking Chadian villiages. The Chadian government sees both the refugees and the militia attacks as attempts by Sudan to destabilize Chad.
On the other hand, the Sudanese accuse Chad of funding the rebels in Darfur.
It’s not, really. The bad relationship between them is a result of the Darfur conflict. The Sudanese government’s actions, supporting the Janjaweed have the side effect of causing problems for Chad, so Chad is responding.
Chad and western Sudan have a fair bit of ethnic overlap. Among those ethnic groups are the pastoralist Zaghawa, a non-Arab speaking group that is largely accounted among the Sudanese “rebels” ( they are technically allied with the agriculturalist Fur, but it has been a tense alliance that may be breaking down ).
President Idris Deby of Chad is a Zaghawa and as is commonly the case in Africa where ethnic favoristism is common, so are many of his top advisors/officials ( they form 1-2% of the population of Chad ). Sudan accuses the Zaghawa of trying to secede with their Chadian conferes to form a ‘Greater Zaghawaland’.
But it is even more complicated, as the Zaghawa are far from being politically unified. Now Deby himself took over Chad from Zaghawa bases inside Sudan in 1989-1990. But a coalition of rebel groups ( 8 of them ) has formed the FUC to oppose him and it was those folks that attacked out of Sudan to threaten Chad the other day. One of the largest of those 8 rebel groups? SCUD, led by a Zaghawa relative of Deby, who formed last year because…
Deby refused to get involved aiding the Zaghawa fighting in Sudan. Yet the SCUD, as part of the FUC, are supposedly getting aid from the Sudanese government which they wanted Deby to fight.
Sudan and Chad relations have been an incestuous mess for decades. You’d need an almighty big scorcard to keep it all straight.
Actually, the conflict between Chad and Sudan is somewhat older. Chad has always had a north-versus-south problem, quite similar to Sudan’s in fact, in that the cleavage is usually between Muslims in the North and Christians/animists in the south. What’s happening now in Chad is something that has happened on and off since 1960, and the safe haven for rebels from the north has typically been Darfur. Also, during the fighting between Chad and Libya over the Aozou strip, refugees would wind up in Darfur, and some were recruited by Libyan agents to fight against the Chadian central government.
It’s a mess, but it’s of a piece with everything else that’s happened in Central Africa (broadly defined) in recent years. And most of it is driven not by national interests, but by the personal interests of dictatorial leaders and aspirants.