Chadian Arabs violence inspired by Sudan
Chadian Arabs, apparently inspired by the actions of Arab militias in Sudan, are beginning to attack non-Arab villages in the interior of Chad.
The violence in Darfur has been spilling over into Chad since at least early this year, when cross-border attacks by Sudanese bandits and militias chased more than 50,000 Chadians living in villages along the border from their homes.
But the violence around one of the other interior villages that was attacked, Kou Kou, is different and ominous, aid workers and analysts say. It appears to have been done by Chadian Arabs against non-Arab villages in Chad, and was apparently inspired by similar campaigns of violence by Sudanese Arab militias in Sudan. The villages are inhabited primarily by farmers from the Daju tribe.
“This is not a cross-border conflict — it is a local interethnic conflict,” said Musonda Shikinda, head of the United Nations refugee agency’s office in the area. “The perpetrators are their neighbors, not people from abroad.”
About 3,000 people have fled their homes because of the recent attacks, and about 100 have been killed, according to United Nations officials.
Accounts of the attacks from displaced people, most of them living in makeshift camps around Kou Kou, are strikingly similar to the accounts given by non-Arab Darfurian refugees of attacks on their villages by Darfur Arabs.
Historically the racial divisions had been largely meaningless in the arid scrublands of Darfur and eastern Chad, but racial ideology, stirred up among landless nomadic Arabs in Darfur against non-Arab farmers the 1980s, laid the groundwork for the present grim conflict over land, resources and identity in Darfur.
The ethnic makeup of eastern Chad is similar to that of Darfur. The border between Chad and Sudan has little practical meaning for the villagers who live, trade and marry across the border, and whose families and tribes often span both Chad and Darfur.
The latest violence here raises fears that Darfur’s troubles could ignite a broader conflict between nomadic Arab tribes and mostly settled non-Arab tribes across this broad swath of the sub-Saharan region.
If the racial and ethnic conflict that has infected Darfur is being copied by Chad’s Arabs, then the violence spreading beyond Darfur’s borders could presage even further regional conflict, said David Buchbinder, a researcher for Human Rights Watch who specializes in Chad.
“The racial ideology is spreading, and that is very dangerous,” Mr. Buchbinder said.
nytimes
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