VI. Background

Factional Politics in Chad

Since independence from France in 1960, a succession of corrupt, abusive, and unaccountable governments have undermined the rights of Chad’s citizens to freely choose their leaders. [1] In Chad’s violent and faction-ridden political culture, opposition concerns often find expression in the form of anti-government insurgent groups, usually organized along ethnic lines. [2]

Since Chadian President Idriss Déby Itno came to power in a 1990 coup d’état, he has frequently used presidential patronage to purchase support from the warlords and clan leaders that constitute the building blocks of political power in Chad. In March 2007 the Defense Ministry was awarded to Chadian rebel leader Mahamat Nour Abdelkerim less than a year after his United Front for Change (Front Uni pour le Changement, FUC) was fighting government troops on the streets of the capital. Patronage often takes the form of a cash payout, known colloquially as “l’enveloppe.” For example, in December 2006, public funds totaling 60,000 CFA (13,000 USD) were offered to each of the 19 Arab nomad chefs de tribu in the sous-préfecture of Abougoudam, southwest of Abéché, following a recruitment visit by Sudanese paramilitary leaders. One of the chefs de tribu said: “The military situation may be calm, but la guerre des enveloppes always continues, and this is a war that is very difficult to fight.” [3] With immediate family members leading the rebellion against him, President Déby has invested heavily in buying loyalty from members of his own Zaghawa ethnic group. [4]

A spoils system that rewards both loyalty and treachery perpetuates conflict in Chad, while ethnic-based alliances that cross borders help destabilize Darfur as well. The Chadian government supports Sudanese rebel groups such as the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), a Zaghawa-dominated faction that has come to play a central role in Chad’s national defense. Chadian Minister of Defense Mahamat Ali Abdullah, a Zaghawa from the same Kobe sub-clan that dominates the JEM, supplied the JEM with vehicles that were used in a May 2008 raid that reached the suburbs of Khartoum. [5]

The Sudanese government in turn supports Chadian rebel groups that include many Chadian nationals that were recruited into Janjaweed militias in Darfur. [6] Opportunism accounts for some of this fluidity between armed groups, but agendas related to land are common to both Chadian rebel groups and Janjaweed militias. Chadian Arab rebels formed the backbone of the Arab Gathering and the Islamic Legion, Libyan-backed paramilitary groups based in Darfur that focused on the establishment of land rights for Arabs in the 1970s and 1980s. [7] CNT rebels established the Association of Chadian Arabs for Literacy, Sedentarization and Solidarity (Association des Arabes Tchadiens pour l’Alphabétisation, la Sédentarisation et la Solidarité, AATASS) to support the permanent settlement of Arab nomads, in the interest of improved access to health and education.

“La Guerre Ethnique” in Dar Sila, 2005 to 2007

Dar Sila, an administrative district in southeast Chad,[8] was the scene of widespread paramilitary violence between 2005 and 2007 that left hundreds of civilians dead, an outbreak of bloodletting known locally as “La Guerre Ethnique.”[9] The proximate cause of violence was not so much ethnic animus as a confluence of interests between Sudanese Janjaweed militias, Chadian rebel groups, and communities in Dar Sila with exploitable grievances.

Due to the fact that the region has rich soil and plentiful ground water that allows some farmers to harvest two crops each growing season, Dar Sila attracted IDPs in the mid-1980s when a severe drought forced 10 percent of Chad’s population to flee their homes.[10]Chefs de canton, traditional leaders responsible for tax collection and dispute resolution, directed drought victims to parcels of farmland and pasture in accordance with customary laws that reserved land ownership rights for members of local communities, known as autochthones.[11]

Mass livestock die-offs during the drought years forced many Arab nomads arriving in Dar Sila to turn to agriculture in order to survive, making access to land with security of tenure a particularly pointed issue.[12] Ouaddaïens, a non-Arab farming tribe that arrived in Dar Sila in large numbers during the drought years, attempted to challenge the customary land system that prevented them from securing property rights in Dar Sila. In 1993, Ouaddaïen drought migrants pursued an administrative scheme that would have transferred the land rights they would have enjoyed in their areas of origin to Dar Sila. As a Dajo chef de village told Human Rights Watch, the plan was vigorously rejected by local Dajo:

Up until 1993 we lived together with no problems. But then the Ouaddaïens said, ‘Now, Dar Sila—it would be better to call it Dar Ouaddaï. It should no longer be called Dar Sila.’ This was a provocation.[13]

The status of Ouaddaïens in Dar Sila deteriorated further when they began to remit tax payments on their land concessions directly to the sultan, the highest customary authority in Dar Sila, bypassing local chefs de canton as a form of protest.[14] A 54-year-old Ouaddaïen farmer who fled drought conditions in Abéché for Dar Sila in 1985 recalled:

The Dajo came to us and said, ‘Why did you come here?’ We told them, ‘Because of the drought.’ The Dajo said, ‘Your belly is full now. It’s time for you to go back where you came from.’ We came here and cleared the brush and cultivated the land more than 20 years ago, and then the Dajo tell us it’s time for us to go home? We cannot accept this.[15]

Tensions between drought migrants and autochtones over access to land in the 1980s and 1990s were unraveling Dar Sila’s social fabric, a situation that was exploited in the early years of this century for recruitment purposes by an alliance of armed actors from both sides of the Chad-Sudan border. One of the keys to cross-border paramilitary alliances was Mahamat Tahir Nouradine, a Nowaybe Arab leader from Modoyna who led Nowaybe settlers to the outskirts of the town of Goube in the Wadi Saleh district of West Darfur in 2004.[16] At the time, Goube was a base of operations for Janjaweed commander Abdullah Ahmad Shinebad, a Beni Halba Arab, as well as Chadian rebel leader Hassan Saleh Al Gadam al-Djinnedi, a Hemat Arab who cantoned elements of his Chadian National Concord Movement(Concorde Nationale du Tchad, CNT) between Goube and the nearby town of Tandousa.[17]

From Goube, Nowaybe Arabs led by Mahamat Tahir Nouradine conducted recruitment in Dar Sila for the militia groups that would come to be known as the Chadian Janjaweed, issuing a call to arms that resonated with landless groups including Arab nomads, Ouaddaïens, and other members of non-Arab ethnic groups that migrated to Dar Sila during the drought years, such as the Mimi.[18]With weapons provided by Hassan al-Djinnedi,[19] the Chadian Janjaweed were poised to lay waste to eastern Chad.[20] Cross-border militia attacks against civilians in Chad began immediately after a September 25, 2005 raid near the town of Modoyna that has been linked to Hassan al-Djinnedi, and which resulted in the deaths of at least 60 civilians.[21] The militia led by Mahamat Tahir Nouradine has been linked to attacks against civilians in the immediate border area in late 2005, including raids in September in the villages of Khadera, Agnata, Am Deguel, and Djerena and November raids in Taroura, Tireya, Koumou, and Abiribiri.[22] Operations by rebel groups often coincided with Chadian Janjaweed militia attacks against civilians, especially those led by Mahamat Nour Abdelkerim.[23]

Retaliatory attacks by local “Tora Bora” militias (community-based self defense groups receiving varying levels of support from the Chadian government) targeted Arab and Ouaddaïen civilians suspected of complicity with the Janjaweed attacks. Government soldiers did little to protect civilians from these exactions, and in many cases were themselves responsible for abuses. In August 2007, Human Rights Watch researchers received 43 separate reports of unlawful killings, torture, and arbitrary arrest by Chadian National Army (ANT, Armée Nationale Tchadienne) soldiers and allied paramilitary groups conducting operations against Chadian Arab rebels with the CNT in Dar Sila.[24]

The UN Mission in Chad

At the height of militia violence in eastern Chad in December 2006, Kofi Annan, then-Secretary General of the United Nations, presented the outlines of a civilian protection force capable of promoting human rights in eastern Chad and supporting peace talks in Chad and the wider region.[25] President Déby was firmly opposed to a peacemaking role for the UN, however, a position that found support from France on the Security Council.[26] Libyan leader Mu`ammar al-Qadhafi was altogether uneasy about the deployment of UN troops to the region. Accordingly, UN Security Council resolution 1778, approved in September 2007, established a multinational presence in Chad that did not include peacekeepers and was not given a political mandate. The United Nations Mission in the Central African Republic and Chad (MINURCAT) included human rights monitors and judicial advisors to promote the rule of law, a civil and political affairs section to promote local reconciliation, and a corrections unit to help professionalize the prison system, but no combat troops. In lieu of blue helmets, the European Union Military Operation in Eastern Chad and North Eastern Central African Republic (EUFOR Tchad/RCA) comprised the force’s military arm.[27]

In September 2008, Security Council resolution 1834 extended MINURCAT’s mandate by six months.[28]In January 2009, UN Security Council resolution 1861 replaced EUFOR’s 3,400 soldiers in Chad with 5,200 UN peackeepers and extended the force’s mandate by one year, to March 15, 2010.[29]

Nature and Scope of Internal Displacement

The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Aid (OCHA) reports that 166,718 civilians were internally displaced in eastern Chad as of April 2009, though the true number is likely to be higher, considering that only a handful of villages in the sous-préfectures of Adé, Modoyna, and Mongororo have been surveyed due to insecurity.[30]

Militia attacks on civilians in Dar Sila have produced two distinct patterns of internal displacement. Dajo, Massalit, and other non-Arab IDPs generally fled to the periphery of large towns where government soldiers and humanitarian workers maintain an active presence. At least 110,000 IDPs are concentrated in and around the towns of Goz Beida, Koukou-Angarana, and Dogdoré, the vast majority of them non-Arab.[31] Fearing retaliation, Arabs, Ouaddaïens, and other groups associated with the Chadian Janjaweed have tended to seek refuge in rural and remote areas, leaving many outside the reach of humanitarian agencies. Members of this group are sometimes referred to by aid workers as the “unofficial” or “invisible” displaced.[32]