New skirmishes reported as UN mulls options

Skirmishes between the army and anti-government rebels are on the rise again in Chad’s lawless far east as the United Nations considers how best to support peacekeeping in the troubled region. “Attacks are happening incessantly and the assailants have left many dead, as well as many of them being taken prisoner,” government spokesman Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor said on Monday. Doumgor was speaking after fighters with the United Front for Change (FUC) rebel coalition attacked Ade, a small garrison town on the border with Sudan 1,200 kilometres east of the capital N’djamena. The Chadian government is focused on fighting rebels whom it says are responsible for an attack on the capital in April that left over 200 people dead. Analysts say authorities are ignoring deadly attacks by militias based in Sudan who have driven over 50,000 Chadians out of their villages. Last week, the leader of the Chadian National Concord, a breakaway rebel faction from the FUC alliance, said the group had fought government troops near Kalogne, a Chadian village roughly 50 kilometres south of Ade. In late June, across the southern border inside the Central African Republic, 20 Chadian rebels reportedly affiliated with a CAR rebel group, and 13 CAR soldiers were killed in a battle close to the Chadian border, according to the UN. Chadian President Idriss Deby has asked the UN to provide peacekeepers to help protect Chadian civilians and the 12 camps for Sudanese refugees the UN runs in Chad. “The situation is very complex between Darfur and Chad, where borders are a political and not a material reality,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres told IRIN on Sunday on the sidelines of the African Union summit in the Gambian capital, Banjul. “We have been discussing at the UN level and with other international partners the possibility, with different kinds of means, to guarantee that security is effectively provided in the area,” Guterres added. But after a meeting with Deby, also at the AU summit, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan told reporters on Sunday that a decision had not yet been reached. “We are considering how best to help stabilise the situation,” Annan said. mn/nr/cs