IX. Risks and Obstacles to Return

The militia violence that left much of Dar Sila devoid of inhabitants left hundreds of villages in ruins, compounding the privation wrought by severe underdevelopment in the region. Out of 326 villages surveyed in Dar Sila in 2008 by INTERSOS, an Italian NGO, only 18 had functioning primary schools and only Goz Beida, Kerfi, Koukou-Angarana, Dogdoré, and Adé had functioning healthcare facilities.[77] Rebuilding civilian infrastructure will be a critical issue for the government, communities, the UN, and NGOs when security conditions change to allow for the durable, safe return of IDPs.

Internally displaced persons who return to their areas of origin in Dar Sila continue to face obstacles ranging from direct threats and attacks to general insecurity, which limits humanitarian access. Furthermore, many of the underlying factors behind conflict in the area, including rights of access and tenure to land and water, remain unresolved. While these are long-term and complex issues, the many reported incidents of violence and intimidation against returnees indicate that processes and mechanisms to address competing claims to land and water are essential to prevent violent confrontations as well as the disenfranchisement of particularly vulnerable groups, such as female-headed households.

Instability Related to Paramilitary Activity

Armed groups ranging from Chadian rebel factions to loosely organized criminal gangs represent an ongoing risk to displaced civilians who seek to return to their areas of origin.

Chadian rebels are firmly installed in the Modoyna pocket, a border point in canton Ouadi Khadjain the extreme northeast of Dar Sila, including groups that have been responsible for the forced recruitment of children.[78]On May 11, 2008, a group of 30 EUFOR soldiers on an eight-day patrol in the Modoyna area was surrounded by 200 Chadian rebels.[79] On October 26, 2008, rebels opened fire on a EUFOR patrol in the same area.[80]Chadian rebels have maintained a longstanding presence in the Tissi area, in the far southeast of Chad, where insecurity contributed to the exodus of approximately 6,000 civilians into Um Dukhun, West Darfur, between February and May 2008.[81]

A previously dormant faction of the CNT seized control of the Chadian border town of Daguessa from September to December 2008 and used death threats to extort money from civilians, including 600 IDPs. An eyewitness recalled “They came and said, ‘Now the government is us.’”[82]

West of Modoyna in canton Koloye, the border towns of Koumou and Abiribiri are under the effective control of the Chadian Janjaweed militia led by Mahamat Tahir Abdelkerim, which has been implicated in deliberate attacks against civilians at the height of the recent violence in Dar Sila. The area of operations of Mahamat Tahir’s militia reportedly extends east from Adé to the Sudanese towns of Tandousa and Goube.[83] Koumou is a destination for seasonal returnees and a temporary displacement site for asylum seekers trying to reach Um-Shalaya, a refugee camp in West Darfur. In May 2008 a farmer named Abbas Anour who had remained in Abiribiri was killed by militia members after he resisted the theft of his animals. Abiribiri’s chef de village said, “They came to take his animals. He refused. They killed him.”[84]

Members of the Koumou militia reportedly extort payments from returnees seeking to cultivate crops and forcibly recruit fighting-age men into their ranks. From his displacement site in Gourounkoum, a 37-year-old IDP recounted his return to Koumou at the start of the 2008 planting season:

When I arrived I saw the chef de village and he told me to present myself to the Janjaweed so they knew I was there. I had to swear on the Quran to join them.[85]

Elsewhere in Dar Sila, former Chadian Janjaweed combatants and Chadian rebel deserters who have little incentive to seek non-violent livelihoods represent an ongoing threat to civilians. A 33-year-old Dajo woman who left Kaloma camp for 11 days during the 2008 planting season to clear fields near her former home in Djorlo, west of Kerfi, told Human Rights Watch:

Many of those people who attacked us are still there. We see them. Sometimes we’re in the fields and we hear gunshots. It’s not safe.[86]

Lack of Information about Security Conditions in Areas of Origin

In order for IDPs to return home voluntarily in safety and dignity, they require accurate and objective information on which to base their decisions. The authorities have a responsibility to ensure this is available as part of their responsibility to establish the conditions and provide the means for safe and voluntary return.[87] In part, it is incumbent on the authorities to provide information, but it is also appropriate that they facilitate and support IDPs in making their own assessment. This issue is a matter of fine judgment and planning for the authorities, because neither should they encourage nor appear to encourage return to areas that are unsafe.

In practice, many IDPs in eastern Chad find it difficult to get accurate information about conditions in their home areas. Most returnees gather information on security conditions in their home villages on their own, with no support. At the beginning of the planting season in May 2008, 20 widows who took refuge in Am Timan following the November 7, 2006 massacre of 36 civilians in Djorlo arrived in the town of Kerfi, southwest of Goz Beida, with their children. Though they were seeking information about security conditions in Djorlo, they planned to stay in Kerfi and plant crops for a season, which is typical of the ad hoc nature of information gathering about security conditions among returning IDPs.[88] A November 2008 UN survey found that only 30 percent of the displaced considered themselves to be informed about the security situation in their home villages. In most cases information about security conditions came not from government sources or humanitarian agencies but from family members who had returned.[89] While the flow of information among IDPs should be encouraged, information from a variety of sources is most likely to enable IDPs to reach a rounded and accurate assessment. An initiative by MINURCAT’s Civil and Political Affairs unit to distribute solar-powered radios to women’s committees in IDP sites and host communities in connection with programming on intercommunity dialogue could be particularly helpful in this regard.[90]

Threats and Attacks against Returnees

Friction between farmers and herders is historically at its height at the end of the rainy season in October and November, when nomads return with their animals to the farming belt and farmers prepare to harvest their crops. Recent attacks against civilians have also occurred during the planting season in May and June, with returning IDPs confronted in many cases by other civilians contesting or ignoring their claims on the land.

The 2008 planting season occasioned numerous threats and attacks against displaced persons returning to their villages to cultivate crops. In June 2008 the chef de village of Bandar village quit his displacement site in Gourounkoum and was planting crops in his home fields when he was approached by a small group of armed men that he recognized immediately:

It was the Ouaddaïens who had lived in the area for a long time. They came to Bandar after the drought. They said to me, “No nazim allowed here. These fields are not your fields. The fields are ours now. Not for you. You should leave.”[91]

A returnee from Aradib displacement site near Koukou-Angarana told Human Rights Watch that a group of armed Ouaddaïens chased him from his home village of Tesou in June 2008 while he was clearing the fields. He said:

One of them said, “From now on, we don’t want to see you in Tesou. If we do, we will kill you. From today, we don’t want to see a Dajo come to work in the fields.”[92]

In mid-June 2008, an unidentified militia attacked returnees in Goz Arbaine II, six kilometers from the border town of Mongororo, burning their homes and forcing them to flee.[93] Also in June, a group of seven displaced persons departed Gourounkoum camp in the Goz Beida area to cultivate tracts of open land in Mahargal, between Goz Beida and Kerfi in canton Goz Beida. Following tribal protocols, the group had asked the local chef de canton for authorization to cultivate the land, but a group of armed nomads they encountered upon arrival threatened to kill them should they remain.[94] Entire harvests have been abandoned as a result of such threats.[95]

During the harvest in November 2008, Djima Gasi, an internally displaced person living in Agadibr, close to Koukou-Angarana, was killed while cultivating crops in his home village, Amjarruba, by the brother of an Arab man he had killed several weeks earlier in a land dispute.[96] Also in November, Moussa Abdelkerim, a Gourounkoum resident, was shot to death while en route to his home village in Goz Darod. His body was discovered near the village of Taroura following an extensive search.[97]

Absence of Traditional Protection Mechanisms

Customary conflict management and resolution institutions that have long regulated social relations in rural areas of eastern Chad are the only existing structures potentially able to foster community safety and protection in areas where modern state institutions are largely absent. Such structures have been disrupted by conflict or are nonexistent in much of eastern Chad, leaving returning IDPs with no organized accountability structures of any kind in many localities. Out of 62 villages between Goz Beida and Dogdoré surveyed by two UNHCR profiling reports, only three reported that customary conflict resolution bodies were functioning, while five other villages reported customary systems for adjudicating disputes between farmers and herders were functioning.[98]

In recent years President Déby has frequently intervened in what Chadian administrations have generally represented as traditional administrative and judicial structures, making it a practice of bestowing customary leadership positions such as chef de canton on potential allies in order to incorporate blocs of support into the patronage system that helps him maintain power. This has degraded the ability of traditional authorities to adjudicate disputes, as have more overt forms of executive interference. For example, Saïd Ibrahim Mustapha Bahid Abunisha, the sultan of Dar Sila, who is based in Goz Beida, was relieved of his duties in December 2007 by Interior Minister Ahamat Mahamat Bashir and replaced by his son.[99] While the elder sultan has been criticized by many Dajo for decisions they believed to be favorable to Arab groups in Dar Sila, his son’s judgments are reported to have been favorable to the majority Dajo tribe. For example, in April 2007, when animals belonging to Arab nomads destroyed crops that displaced persons from Gassire IDP site had planted on a well-established transhumance corridor, the secretary general and sous-prefet of Goz Beida ruled that the fields had to be removed, but the newly installed sultan overruled them.[100]

President Déby is not just putting allies into chef de canton positions, but creating new cantons as well. When Déby came to power in 1990 there were scarcely 100 chefs de canton in Chad, but after 19 years of factional rule, there are 218.[101]The effect of this is “divide and rule” and the disintegration of larger traditional power blocs, encouraging subclans to petition for their own independent status. Some chefs de canton, faced with the prospect of losing part of their territory to a government-appointed rival, have threatened to join the rebellion as a means of dissuading the government from manipulating traditional systems.[102]

Inequitable Distribution of Humanitarian Aid

Impartiality in humanitarian relief demands that those in the greatest need are prioritized. In eastern Chad aid agencies are operating in an environment in which security often restricts their ability to systematically reach persons in dire need. In August 2007 and June 2008, for example, Human Rights Watch visited 11 Arab and Ouaddaïen displacement sites in rural areas where security and logistical considerations prevent aid workers from reaching them.[103] At Tcharo, a rural displacement site on the outskirts of Goz Beida, Alaounie Arabs who fled their homes in Bahar Azum and Tissi in August 2006 supplemented their diets with roots and leaves collected in surrounding fields.[104] At Taybeh, the largest site visited by Human Rights Watch, IDPs from the Arab Zaghawa tribe who fled the Kerfi area in late 2006 reported that five children died of disease and malnutrition in 2008, including three infants.[105]

Unfortunately, many Chadian Arabs believe they are victims of bias. A Chadian Arab chef de tribu said:

In any conflict you must understand both sides, but humanitarians listen to one side and not the other. Everyone suffers, but no one sees the suffering of the Arabs.[106]

Such resentments are easily exploited by armed groups with a recruitment agenda.[107] According to a Chadian Arab chef de tribu, Sudanese Arab tribal and paramilitary leaders attempted to make use of resentments over aid inequalities during a December 2006 recruitment visit to the Arab nomad sous-préfecture of Abougoudam:

They said, “In Chad, your government considers you to be the enemy. If you are Arab, you cannot get humanitarian assistance. Join us in Darfur.”[108]

Differential access to humanitarian assistance adds to factional tensions, but it is a function of logistical and security constraints, not bias, and it does not only affect Arabs, or even those situated in rural and remote areas. Community groups in Dar Sila that have not been displaced from their home villages generally do not receive humanitarian assistance, which is specifically targeted to IDPs and refugees. Among host communities in eastern Chad, over 20 percent of children under five are affected by global acute malnutrition, well above the emergency threshold of 15 percent established by the World Health Organization (WHO). In 2004, before the influx of refugees and IDPs, the incidence of global acute malnutrition among children under five in eastern Chad was 13 percent.[109]

Humanitarian interventions that act as an incentive for displaced persons to return to areas of origin should be carefully balanced against the needs of persons who may not have been displaced but may be struggling for survival in areas where police forces are absent and traditional conflict resolution structures may be fragile or non-existent.[110] Humanitarian organizations have distributed seeds and tools in return areas, despite the fact that violence has erupted between host groups and IDPs over access to assistance in some of those same areas.[111]

For example, resentment between host groups and IDPs broke out on July 8, 2008, in Kerfi, where local Mouro looted NGO compounds and chased Dajo IDPs to the nearby villages of Arata, Agourtoulou, Gagnan, Arangou, and Bakigna, stealing recently distributed food aid. Three days later, unidentified gunmen fired at recently returned IDPs in Bakigna. A fact-finding mission later determined that the violence was related to frustration among the Mouro about unequal treatment by NGOs, which were encouraged to expand assistance to local inhabitants.[112]

Well-founded concerns about logistics and security militate against the provision of assistance in many rural areas. However, all civilians in need have a right to access and receive humanitarian assistance.[113] It is urgent that this be addressed in Dar Sila, where some groups still receive the bulk of humanitarian assistance and others have little or no access.

Attacks on Humanitarians and Restricted Humanitarian Access

The war economy that saw much of the livestock in Dar Sila looted between 2005 and 2007 is now also being perpetuated through the looting of easily transferable humanitarian assets, such as four-wheel drive vehicles, at the considerable expense of IDPs in need of assistance.

More than 160 attacks on humanitarian workers in eastern Chad were reported in 2008, including four fatalities.[114] On July 10, 2008, Oxfam withdrew from Kerfi, southeast of Goz Beida, after an armed attack on its compound, cutting off aid to more than 11,000 people.[115] Humanitarian assistance to 26,000 conflict-affected civilians was suspended in Dogdoré, 30 kilometers west of the Sudan border, following attacks against aid workers in October 2008.[116]

At a July 2008 meeting chaired by the UN Humanitarian Coordinator, humanitarians working in eastern Chad complained that Chadian government officials failed to respond to the death threats, harassment, intimidation, and car-jackings they faced.[117] In December 2008, the NGO Save the Children-UK announced that it was closing its program in Chad following the May 2008 shooting death of country director Pascal Marlinge.[118] Gendarmes in charge of investigating the killing recovered the murder weapon but failed to recover cartridge casings from the crime scene, did not dust the murder weapon for fingerprints, and did not retain the weapon.[119]

Attacks that are knowingly and intentionally directed against humanitarian workers are serious violations of humanitarian law,[120] and may constitute war crimes.

Unresolved Issues Related to Land Tenure

Humanitarian efforts to address immediate needs should be complemented by initiatives to address key issues that are among the root causes of conflict and insecurity, such as issues around rights to land and water, both tenure and access, which in turn are open to instrumentalization by armed groups with more national agendas. The authorities and civil society, supported by the UN, need to address land issues as part of reconciliation initiatives.

In June 2008 Arab tribal leaders attending traditional peace talks in Goz Beida announced that they wished to reconcile with their former neighbors, but the talks were derailed by the refusal of Ouaddaïen tribal leaders to participate.[121] At the same time, Ouaddaïens from Dar Sila are reported to have been joining Chadian rebel groups in Darfur in significant numbers.[122] Ouaddaïens have had a strong presence in insurgent groups since a series of government massacres the early 1990s.[123] As recently as September 2008, Ouaddaïen farmers in the village of Titiri III, seven kilometers from the border town of Daguessa in Dar Sila, were informed by local Dajo leaders that they no longer had the right to live on the land they had long cultivated.[124]

Conflicts over land can be extremely localized. Tensions regarding land access have increased in some areas due to displaced persons renting arable land from host communities and receiving suboptimal plots.[125] Reports that local leaders have rented or sold abandoned land is of particular concern. For example, the village of Kreta I has been occupied by Arab nomads who dug traditional wells for their animals, which may have involved a payment to a local chef de canton that violates the rights of displaced land owners.[126]

Land tenure issues are of immediate urgency for women, particularly widows. Faced with a scarcity of land, traditional leaders may overlook women’s land rights, especially in the case of women attempting to obtain land following the death of a male relative.[127] Article 161 of Chad’s constitution prohibits customs that discriminate among citizens, but in practice, widows often lose their inheritance when a brother or cousin traditionally inherits his relative’s possessions, including the widow and children.[128]

Land tenure in Chad is governed by Acts n° 23, 24, and 25 of July 22, 1967. TheNational Land Observatory(Observatoire National du Foncier) was established in 2001 to formulate land legislation and train local leaders in the requirements of national and international law and to familiarize magistrates with customary practices. Newly conferred land rights in areas where land has been temporarily abandoned for security reasons should be suspended until the government has clarified the obligations of government and traditional authorities with regard to the allocation of land and the regulation of its transfer.

Land Occupation

The nature and scope of land occupation in Dar Sila varies considerably by locality. In some areas, organized paramilitary groups have taken control of areas they now claim as their own, where returnees are obligated to pay extortion money and may live under abusive conditions. Nomads may use violence and threats of violence to deter returns to areas that they have no intention of occupying, and what returnees describe as land occupation may in fact be the squats of other displaced persons who take temporary possession of abandoned structures while in transit or assessing security conditions in their home villages.

Unlawful land occupation appears to be most extensive in border areas such as canton Ouadi Khadja, among the most fertile tracts of land in the region. A survey conducted by the Italian NGO INTERSOS in Koloye canton found Ouaddaïens from the village of Agougou Ouaddaï cultivating crops in the villages of Kayawa, Kawaya Moubi, and in Kalkibedo Dajo I, II and III. In the same zone, IDPs from Adé were found cultivating crops in the abandoned villages of Hille Mana and Kobalka Massalit.[129] Another INTERSOS survey in eight villages in Ouadi Khadja canton received reports of Ouaddaïens occupying farmland abandoned by IDPs in each instance.[130] Also among those occupying abandoned villages were returning Dajo refugees that had taken refuge in Tandousa and Goube in West Darfur.[131]

In mid-2007, returnees began to report that areas of Dar Sila in the control of anti-government paramilitary groups had been designated part of Sudan Djadid (Arabic for New Sudan). Such reports raise concerns of the possibility that land occupation is progressing in an organized fashion. Both Koumou and Abiribiri in canton Koloye are also considered to be part of Sudan Djadid,[132] which reportedly includes the area east of Koloye, which during the rainy season is only accessible from Sudan. A Dajo farmer who returned to cultivate land in his home village near Mongororo, also inaccessible from Chad during the rains, told Human Rights Watch:

We were preparing the fields when the Arab nomads came to us and said, “This is not your land. You’re nazim [an internally displaced person]. This land belongs to the Arab nomads.”[133]

The same is true for the town of Hadjer Beit, south of Modoyna near the Sudan border, as one man recalled:

Government soldiers have not been to Hadjer Beit, but Chadian rebels are there. They call it Sudan Djadid.[134]

A returnee from Gourounkoum said he went back to the town of Djedide, adjacent to Koumou, and noted the presence of uniformed Chadian rebels, one of whom shot in the air and said, “This is from [Sudanese president] Omar al-Bashir.”[135]

Civilians forcibly transferred from their homes in violation of international standards are entitled to return to their homes under the so-called “right of return.”[136] Internally displaced persons are protected against illegal occupation under international law.[137] Such guarantees must be asserted in a manner that upholds any rights secondary occupiers may have in domestic or international law.[138]