Janjawid attacks surge as rebels fight on

An upswing in cross-border attacks on Chadian civilians since early October has coincided with new bouts of fighting between the Chadian army and rebels.

Aid agency and government officials said Goz Beida, 160 km west of the Sudan border, and 200 km south of the regional aid-hub Abeche was briefly occupied by armed rebels on Sunday afternoon.

“The rebels attacked yesterday at 4 pm in the area around Goz Beida. They were repulsed by the Chadian army,” Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor, a government spokesman, told IRIN on Monday.

Aid workers contacted in Goz Beida on Monday confirmed to IRIN that the rebels had left the town and had not threatened aid operations.

The attack is the latest in a string of attacks this year by rebels who have vowed to overthrow Chad’s President Idriss Deby.

But analysts warned that the mounting skirmishes are leaving a trail of corpses in their wake as deadly “Janjawid” attacks against Chadian civilians are surging at the same time. Often used to describe militias in the neighbouring Darfur region of Sudan, Janjawid is an Arabic word that means “devils on horseback”.

The London-based human rights watchdog Amnesty International said in a statement on Friday that a new wave of attacks on Chadian civilians from across the Chad-Sudan border started on 3 October, and have continued since then.

Gaetan Mootoo, Chad researcher at Amnesty International, who has conducted field research in eastern Chad, said he believes Janjawid attacks tend to surge around the time of rebel attacks because the Chadian military is distracted and not protecting the border.

“My sense is that when we look at the pattern of attacks that have occurred in regions which were not protected by Chadian forces we can see there is a lack of provision by the Chadian authorities to protect their citizens, and that is when the Janjawid come to attack civilians,” Mootoo said.

“If there were proper patrolling that would lessen the occurrences or there would not be attacks,” he said. “We have seen in the past that when there is an armed presence there is no attack by the Janjawid.”

Chad’s President Deby has accused Sudan of harbouring the rebels fighting against his government, but Khartoum has denied this and likewise accused Deby of allowing rebels opposed to it to shelter in eastern Chad.

Chad and Sudan have signed an accord committing each not to host rebel groups, and last week agreed to put joint patrols on the ground along the vast, desert border.

Adrien Fenou, Chad analyst at the Global Insight forecasting group in London, said that the alliance between the governments of Sudan and Chad and rebel movements opposed to their neighbours is getting closer not more distant.

“Before, we saw Chadian rebels operating their back bases in Darfur and launching attacks in Chad and the other way around. Now we see a more straightforward alliance between the Chadian government and Sudanese rebels fighting the Sudan government,” he said.

“The alliances don’t function in a formal way, but there is a set of circumstances that force implicit alliances to occur,” Fenou said. “If the [anti-Khartoum rebel movement] helps the Chad government root out [anti-Chad] rebels then there is an understanding the government will allow them to exist. It’s not so formalised, and it is likely to change depending on the military realities.”

Khartoum is currently considering whether to allow a UN peacekeeping force to replace an African Union mission in the country, the mandate for which will expire at the end of the year.

Chad’s President Deby has asked that the UN does not ignore Chad and recommended it put its blue-helmeted soldiers on the ground there too.

Sunday’s attack has revealed a previously unheard of alliance of Chadian rebel groups, the Union of Forces for Democracy (UFD). Analysts said the UFD is a military and political amalgamation of three Chadian rebel groups, including the United Front for Democratic Change (FUC) which was the largest group until it splintered earlier in the year.

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