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Abstract
Two recent events seem to indicate that, after three years of turbulence, the situation in this part of the continent would return to normal.Footnote1 The first event was on 3 May 2006 when Idriss Déby Itno was re-elected as president of Chad, with over 77 per cent of the votes. The second, two days later, was the signature of a peace agreement on Darfur in Abuja, the Nigerian capital. However, our analysis stresses that the crises in Chad and Darfur are closely related and that the situation will probably continue to deteriorate. It concludes that such deterioration will occur unless account is taken of the transnational aspects of these crises, which are also to be seen in the destabilisation of the Central African Republic.
Notes
1. To illustrate the democratic functioning of institutions, as is the tradition in Chad, on 29 May2006 the score was reduced to 64.67 per cent by the Supreme Court.
2. For another example of how this concept is used, see Roland Marchal, ‘Liberia, Sierra Leone,Guinea: a war without frontiers’, Politique africaine, No. 88, December 2002.
3. On Chad, see the last report of the International Crisis Group, Tchad: vers le retour de la guerre?, Brussels, May 2006. For Darfur, see Roland Marchal, ‘Le Soudan d'un conflit à l'autre’, Les Etudes du CERI, No. 107, September 2004; ‘La guerre au Darfour’, Politique africaine, October 2004, as well as the dossier dedicated to the subject in the review Afrique contemporaine, No. 214, 2005 and the following books: Gérard Prunier, Le Darfour: un génocide ambigu, Paris, La Table Ronde, 2005 and Alex de Waal and Julie Flint, Darfur: a short history of a long war, London, Zed Books, 2005.
4. Note J. Tubiana's reminder at the end of his article, ‘Le Darfour, un conflit pour la terre?’, Politique africaine, No. 101, March/April 2006.
5. He died in a helicopter crash on 30 July 2005 and was succeeded by Salva Kiir Mayardit.
6. R. Collins and J. Burr, Africa's Thirty Years' War: Libya, Chad and the Sudan, 1963-1993, Boulder, Westview Press, 1999.
7. Alex de Waal, Famine that kills: darfur, Sudan, 1984-1985, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988.
8. As the joke goes, ‘Gorane under Habré, Zaghawa under Déby’.
9. See Andrea Behrends' ongoing research.
10. Abdelwahid, President of the MLS, is a Fur; Khamis, Vice-President, is a Masalit and Mini,Secretary-General, is a Zaghawa/Gala. Thus the three most important ethnic groups in the insurrection are represented at the top. But this representation can rapidly challenged by events and in no way reflect military realities.
11. Khalil is a Zaghawa/Kobé, close de Hassan Tourabi, Minister of State for North Darfur, whowas at one time responsible for the Popular Defence Forces.
12. Chadians often complain about their sub-prefects who are usually Zaghawa and designated bythe President. They can neither read nor write, being ‘bilingual illiterates’, with ‘diplomas from the school of the goats’.
13. In spite of some discrepancies, the book by Alex de Waal and Julia Flint is a good source ofinformation in this respect. See also a very good synthesis of the history of the conflict, published by the UN: Domenico Polloni, Darfur in pieces. Conflict analysis tools, No.6, Khartoum, United Nations, 24 March 2006.
14. While certain Arab tribal militia have very good relations with the Sudanese army and thePopular Defence Forces, it should be recalled that the Governor of North Darfur, General Ibrahim Suleiman, imprisoned Musa Hilal (one of their chiefs) and some of his followers whom he considered as bandits, in the autumn of 2002. They were released in the spring of 2003 by the Vice-President, Ali Osman Mohamed Taha, and ever since have been leading the notoriously dirty war.
15. Letter dated 30 January 2006 from the Chairman of the Committee addressed to the Presidentof the Security Council, transmitting the Report of the Panel of Experts, submitted in accordance with resolution 1591 (2005), 30 January 2006, accessible on http://daccessdds.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N05/632/74/PDF/N0563274.pdf?OpenElement. See also the monthly reports of the Security Council on the situation in Darfur accessible on http://www.un.org/Docs/sc/sgrep06.htm
16. Abbas Koty was an important personality in the MPS (a Kobé linked to the family of the Sultanof Hiriba) who founded the Comité national de redressement (National Recovery Committee), following a failed attempt at a coup d'état in 1992. He returned to N'Djamena after a reconciliation guaranteed by Sudan and Libya and was killed on 22 October 1993.
17. Nourene Manawi Bartcham, Secretary of the MNRD, is a Chadian, a former member of thePatriotic Salvation Movement and author of a hagiographic biography of Idriss Déby, published in Arabic. Among the Zaghawa he is known as one of Débre's right-hand men. ‘Colonel’ Djibrine Abdelkarim ‘Tek’ had a more eventful history: as a military man he rebelled, with other Zaghawa in 1992, under the leadership of Abbas Koty. He was then in Darfur as the military leader of his organization, the National Revolutionary Council. Thanks to the mediation of Sudan and the arrests of several leaders in Libya, this rebellion soon ceased and he returned to Chad in 1993 where he was incidentally assigned to the presidential guard for a while. The MNRD split some months after it was created, after clashes with the Chadian army.
18. On 18 January 2006, the MJE of Khalil Ibrahim, the faction of the Sudanese Liberation Army ofMini Arkoi Minawi and the faction of Khamis Abdallah signed a first text. A second agreement was signed with the MNRD on the 23rd, but without the participation of the MJE.
19. See the Report of the International Commission of Inquiry on Darfur to the United Nations Secretary General, pursuant to Security Council Resolution 1564 of 18 September 2004, Geneva, 25 January 2005.
20. The very structure of the army is absurd: there are as many officers and non-commissionedofficers as there are soldiers. Déby goes to great lengths to avoid making the radical reform that is regularly demanded by donors.
21. See Marielle Debos' ongoing research, as well as that of J. Roitman, Fiscal Disobedience. An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005. Saïbou Issa, ‘L'ambuscade sur les routes des abords sud du Lac Tchad’, Politique africaine, No. 94, June 2004.
22. ‘France supports the position of President Déby who has been twice democratically elected. Itwelcomes the fact that the National Assembly by a larger majority than usual, supported the government and approved the revision of the Constitution’ (28 May 2004, on a visit to Chad).
23. For details of the economic aspects that have been little treated in this text, read: OECDDevelopment Centre and African Development Bank, African Economic Outlook 2005/2006 – Country Studies: Chad, 16 May 2006, accessible on: http://www.oecd.org/searchResult/0,2665,en_2649_201185_1_1_1_1_1,00.html. The irony of this Chadian political crisis is that it is partly linked to the aspirations of the population and the elites that have been created by oil revenues, but the debate on oil exploration, the policies of the large corporations and the World Bank do not give rise to the political debate that might logically be expected.
24. By adopting a certain discourse of the opposition one risks forgetting that a large part of thispopulation lives in condition as miserable as the others.
25. See the site http://www.sudanjem.com/en/index.php.
26. Déby, who uses the Darfurian groups who signed the January agreements as auxiliary forces isnot in favour of the Abuja agreement which deprives him of fighters, while his opposition remains in Darfur. For this reason he attempted, with some success, to divide the group of Mini by promoting another Zaghawa leader, Sharif Harir, providing him with arms and munitions. See, especially, ‘Sudan: clashes reported between Darfur rebel factions’, excerpt from report by Sudanese independent Al-Mashahir website on 30 May, BBC monitoring, 31 May 2006.
27. The Tama are agriculturalists who, in the 1990s, came up against the Zaghawa pastoralistswhose pastures had been destroyed by the drought. After many incidents they found refuge in Darfur. Mahamat Nour, the grandson of the Sultan, based his popular support on this forced exile.
28. K. Bennafla, ‘Tchad: l'appel des sirènes arabo-islamiques’, Autrepart, Vol.16, 2002.
29. Interview in Khartoum, February 2006.