Chad will back United Nations moves to end the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region by allowing international peacekeepers on its own soil and supporting peace talks, President Idriss Itno Déby said on Friday.
Déby made the commitment to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who was in Chad on a regional tour to canvass support for the UN’s peacekeeping initiative for Darfur.
After Ban met Sudanese leaders in Khartoum on Thursday, Sudan’s government announced it would start talks in Libya on October 27 with rebel groups to try to forge a peace in Darfur, where political and ethnic violence has raged since 2003.
”We’ve agreed to contribute all we can to this effort to resolve the Sudanese conflict,” Déby told reporters.
He said Chad was offering to host a preliminary meeting for the Darfur rebel leaders to smooth out obstacles and difficulties prior to the October talks in Tripoli.
The Darfur conflict, which has killed about 200 000 people and driven more than two million from their homes, has spilled refugees, rebels and militiamen over the border into Chad, spawning inter-ethnic violence and a humanitarian crisis.
Ban told reporters before meeting Déby it was encouraging that the Chadian president had agreed to the deployment of a European Union peacekeeping force on Chad’s eastern border as part of the UN’s efforts to end the Darfur conflict.
Complementing plans for a 26 000-strong joint UN-African Union peacekeeping force for Darfur, up to 3 000 European Union troops are to be deployed in eastern Chad and north Central African Republic to try to contain the spread of violence.
”Chad is one of the important regional players in addressing the situation in Darfur,” Ban said.
Previous talks on Darfur held in Nigeria produced a 2006 peace deal between the government and one Darfur rebel group that failed to end bloodshed despite the deployment of 7 000 African Union peacekeepers.
Emergency appeal
As Ban arrived in Ndjamena, the UN World Food Programme (WFP) appealed for emergency funds to feed more than 400 000 refugees and displaced civilians in eastern Chad who have fled the regional violence. More than half are refugees from Darfur.
UN agencies are caring for the refugees in teeming camps, and the WFP said $81-million was required to feed the needy in 2008.
”Donors need to act now to avoid the risk of any delay in providing food for hundreds of thousands of people who entirely depend on WFP for their daily survival,” Felix Bamezon, WFP country director, said in a statement.
Jean-Marie Guehenno, head of the UN peacekeeping department, said 300 UN police instructors would train 850 Chadian police to help guard the refugee camps, while the planned EU military force would have a wider security role.
”The military is not focusing on the camps but the lines of communication are fragile. You have sort of roaming bands that can really make up a threat, first to the population and to any international deployment as they move around,” he told reporters on the flight from Khartoum.
”So the main purpose of the EU force would be to ensure the area’s security and obviously to protect civilians in imminent danger,” he added.
He said the EU force would not patrol the border itself because Chad was concerned there should be no overlap with a Chad-Sudan-Libya border monitoring accord.
Guehenno said he would go to Brussels on Monday to talk to the EU, which is expected to give the final go-ahead for the planned Chad force on September 17. — Reuters