Les crises politiques sont aujourdhui manifestes au Darfour et au Tchad. Malgré leurs multiples différences, ces crises convergent pour constituer un véritable système de guerres qui ne présage rien de bon pour une mise en œuvre des accords sur le Darfour signés à Abuja le 5 mai pas plus que pour le dialogue national tchadien, officiellement inauguré le 28 juillet 2006. Cette donne signifie également à terme une fragilisation de la situation en République centrafricaine, sauf à espérer que la communauté internationale s'atèle à une résolution densemble de ces conflits sans les cantonner dans les espaces nationaux où ils semblent pourtant se déployer.
Cet article essaie de rendre compte de certaines dimensions transnationales et régionales, qui depuis 2003 ont contribué à structurer les acteurs armés, à guider leurs comportements et à hiérarchiser leurs priorités. Il souligne en particulier le rôle prédominant que les régimes en place au Soudan et au Tchad ont eu sur la configuration politique et militaire depuis cette date.
On ne peut, en particulier, pas expliquer ces liens complexes par un simple effet de débordement du conflit soudanais au Tchad, pas plus que l'archéologie du conflit actuel au Tchad ne peut se résumer à la mention des événements traumatiques provoqués dès le début des années 1980 par la sanctuarisation au Darfour des oppositions armées tchadiennes luttant contre le pouvoir en place à Ndjamena.
L'analyse doit donc au contraire sancrer dans un espace-frontière, un véritable terroir historique des révoltes depuis les indépendances contre les Etats en place et prendre en compte les transformations sociales qui, malgré la porosité absolue des frontières, ont marqué les trajectoires des groupes concernés. Les rapports aux deux Etats concernés et à l'économie-monde autant que les alignements politiques ou idéologiques ont ainsi joué un rôle autrement plus fondamental quune solidarité ethnique transnationale souvent plus mise en scène que réelle, comme le démontrent à l'été 2006 les affrontements entre Darfouriens ou les difficultés à concevoir un cadre commun pour un dialogue national au Tchad.
La description proposée suggère également les risques inhérents à la situation actuelle : une véritable guerre d'attrition dans l'Est du Tchad et la constitution d'un système factionnel militarisé au Darfour, incapable de mettre en péril le pouvoir de Khartoum mais véritable antidote à tout règlement sérieux de la crise dans l'Ouest soudanais.
Une telle conjoncture ne peut qu'inviter à réfléchir sur le rôle et les ambitions des Etats de la région, au-delà de ceux les plus directement impliqués et de la communauté internationale. Il est alors patent que, dans le règlement de ces crises, transparaît une compétition sans merci pour obtenir le statut de puissance régionale quitte à apparaître pour l'heure comme le possible spoiler daccords de paix. La communauté internationale semble quant à elle avancer à reculons : elle na pas voulu voir la crise au Darfour et la reléguée pendant de trop longs mois à une seule crise humanitaire. Elle a préféré s'en remettre à l'ancienne puissance coloniale pour le règlement de la crise politique tchadienne, en faisant d'emblée l'impasse sur les stratégies transnationales des dirigeants soudanais et tchadiens et en en occultant les dimensions militaires.
L'article conclut en s'interrogeant sur la viabilité d'accords séparés qui ne permettraient pas de déconstruire ce système de conflits qui pourrait à terme inclure une bonne part de la Centrafrique.
As with the conflicts on the river Mano, a system of wars has developed, as armed conflict resulting from distinct national situations and involving different actors, methods and issues, have become connected with each other, spilling over the geographical, social and political borders that originally distinguished them. The conflicts overlap one another, with repercussions that affect their continuation and, above all, the confronting parties, the issues at stake and the aims being pursued. This complexity of civil and international armed violence thus constitutes a system.2
We shall briefly summarise the reasons for our approach but without going into details on the structural causes of these two crises.3 It should not be thought that the Chadian crisis – that will be considered later – is just an extension of the Darfur crisis (as President Déby said in his speeches), any more than the war in Darfur is ultimately due to Déby's Zaghawa origin, because his kinsmen are over-represented in the Darfurian military and insurgents (according to Sudanese security sources). The crises in Darfur and Chad have different origins and are unaffected by the same contradictions, just as they have become militarised in different ways. A priori there is no symmetry in the two situations, even if some of the actors appear to conform to this division (i.e. Arabs and non-Arabs).4
The situation should be viewed from three different angles. The first is the crisis in Darfur and the military and symbolic issues that are taking shape as a result of the very difficult negotiations in Abuja. The second is the incapacity of the Déby regime to reform itself in order to broaden its social basis, for reasons linked to his own survival and to the assurances he has received from the French Government for many years. The third, only briefly tackled in this text, concerns the pattern of interests among the international community, especially the United States, Libya and France. The US want to settle the crisis in Darfur, the Libyans want to avoid an international presence there, while the French will protect Déby at any cost. If French policy in this matter remains unchanged (as, for example, in Ivory Coast, given we are in the last phase of the Chirac presidency), it will play a not insignificant role in the growing militarisation of the Chadian political crisis and in increasing the complexity between it and the Darfur conflict that is so difficult to resolve.
The war in Darfur
It should be immediately made clear that the Darfur crisis is a political one, which is caused by the way the Sudanese state has been functioning for many years as well as the deteriorating management of the eco-systems that have been undermined by desertification. Conflicts over land ownership, which have become more acute because of ecological and demographic tensions over the last two decades, could have had other outcomes than those prevailing since 2003. The primary responsibility for this lies with the Islamist regime in Khartoum which, faced with the difficulty of its negotiations with the Sudan People's Liberation Movement (SPLM), led by John Garang5 at the time, was incapable of avoiding a military escalation, or unwilling to do so.
Right from the beginning the preliminaries leading up to the Darfur conflict had important transversal dimensions and three of the main ones will be examined here. First, history: the present conflict in western Sudan is, to a large extent, linked to the events that shattered this region during the 1980s and whose actors are both Sudanese and Chadians. Next is the armed mobilisation of the ethnic groups situated along the frontier who, each in its own way, played an important role in prolonging the insurrection. Finally, the policies of the countries in the region have also considerably helped to strengthen the links between these two contexts.
A 20-year old conflict
It is important to stress, although this should be done cautiously, that the conflict that exploded in Darfur at the beginning of 2000 was heir to the tragic events of the 1980s. In an international context that was then very different, marked by the hostility of the Western countries and their allies in the region to the ambitions of Colonel Ghaddafi,6 Darfur became a sanctuary for Chadian dissidents. This was the time when Hissène Habré came to power in N'Djamena (in 1982) and the remains of the defeated Government of National Unity of Chad (GUNT) took refuge in this region as did Idriss Déby in 1989, not to quote the creation of the Front National de Liberation du Tchad in Nyala in 1965. These events and their impact on the local society, as well as the intolerable drought of the mid-1980s,7 proved to be a dramatic period that exacerbated the end of the dictatorship of Colonel Nimeiri in Sudan.
The arrival, in April 1989, of Idriss Déby, chief of the general staff fleeing after an attempted coup d'état in N'Djamena, and his efforts to create a military force are at the origin in this region of a social and military polarisation, traces of which can still be seen today: Déby obtained his support from his ethnic group and the Arab militia of the Revolutionary Democratic Council. Conflicts multiplied, particularly between the Fur population (the main ethnic group of Darfur) and Arabs, facilitated by the military aid supplied by Libya to the partisans of Idriss Déby and by Chad to the local population who lost control over the land and water because of this militarised foreign presence. This was also a period of population growth that blurred national identities still further – already unstable in such a zone and situation. Aware that they would not receive any humanitarian aid from a regime that they were fighting, some Chadian Arab groups, who were now on the side of Khartoum, particularly Awled Zeyd and Mahamid, had by then consolidated their presence in Darfur, less for strategic reasons than for sheer survival.
This regionalisation of the war in Chad encouraged the ethnic group of Idriss Déby, the Zaghawa, to unite behind him, first of all to protect themselves from the brutal attacks by Hissène Habré in 1989 and 1990 across the Sudanese border. This unity was not however automatic, as can be seen today in the splits between the Zaghawa: internal divisions like those created by two different national histories had a profound impact on the Zaghawa. In fact, the Bideyat – Déby's clan – is basically Chadian and is not found over the border. The Sudanese Zaghawa, while they might have contacts with their Chadian relatives, do not belong to the same clans. Thus, on the Chadian side, besides the Bideyat, by far the most important are the Kobé, situated along the frontier, the Kapka (a sub-clan that has become autonomous from the Kobé) and the Borogate, who are often associated with the Goranes, the ethnic group of Hissène Habré.8 On the Sudanese side, there are many Zaghawa clans, but the most important in numbers and military terms from this period onwards are the Gala and the Twer, as well as the Suweini, Artaj, Awlad Digein, etc. The relationships between the Chadian Zaghawa groups are anything but simple, mainly because French colonialism reorganised the chefferies and only one branch of the Kobé – that of Hiriba – really benefited by increasing the pre-eminence of its sultanate. Memories of this historic period are often invoked in the present political crisis.
This alignment with Déby was also encouraged by the Sudanese and Libyan authorities who supported the former military chief Hissène Habrè in 1989. Ethnic solidarity – too often said to be almost instinctive – was thus based more on a rational calculation, while the possibilities of ‘booty’ are not without importance. It was a question of getting positions in the conquered state apparatus and to benefit in one way or another from the facilities that come with its control, but also to use it to defend any claims that could be entertained by the Zaghawa on the Sudanese side of the frontier.
As for the Chadian Arab groups, in the early 1980s, before the break between Déby and Habré, they went through a very difficult period. It was then that Idriss Déby and those close to him carried out repressive measures on behalf of Hissène Habré. The divisions between the Arab leaders and all the conflicts that were intensified by their withdrawal to Sudan did not prevent them from installing themselves in western Sudan. In the current war in Darfur, the Arab groups are deliberately mobilised by Sudanese military intelligence who stress their Chadian status and the precariousness of their presence to make them foot soldiers in a war that is not really theirs. Perhaps because their military importance is not great, little is known about the attitude of the Masalit (a people who live in two sultanates, one in Chad and one in Darfur) in the first phase of the conflict, while they were being confronted by ‘invasions’ from both sides.9
Different levels of mobilisation in the current Darfur war
While the situation was deteriorating at the end of the 1990s, a number of processes were at work. First was the disillusionment with President Dèby. Then as the situation worsened, the solidarity pact between the Chadian and Sudanese Zaghawa concluded in 1989 was recalled. Intellectuals were formulating ethnonationalist discourses and finally political and military cadres emerged that were bent on organising self-defence militia because of the local conflicts stirred up by regional political and military movements. These developments converged to explain the creation of the armed groups in Darfur – the Movement/Army for the Liberation of Sudan (SLM/A), whose chief leaders are Abdel Wahid Mohamed Ahmed Nur, Khamis Abdallah Abakar and Mini Arkoi Minawi,10 and the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) led by Khalil Ibrahim Mohamed.11 This also explains their social roots and their difficulties in organising and promoting concrete political programmes that go beyond petitions stating principles.
Discontent with Déby grew and became more radical during the 1990s, evidently reaching a peak during the congress of his party, the Patriotic Salvation Movement (MPS), in November 2003. Even before Déby expressed his wish to present himself for a third mandate and to change the constitution – thus breaking a promise he had often made – many Zaghawa strongly criticised his incapacity to ‘share’, his amateur management of the state apparatus12 and his political shortsightedness. Unable to make political compromises Déby was endangering the permanence of the Zaghawa gains. These criticisms did not come only from the same circles nor did they have the same objectives but it was evident that the Zaghawa, like the population as a whole, were divided as to how to evaluate the regime. This was expressed in an attempted coup d'etat in May 2004 and, as from autumn 2005, recurrent defections both from among governing circles and the praetorian guard of the Chadian regime.
The situation in Darfur degenerated in various phases during the 1990s and there were clashes that, well before the ‘official’ date of February 2003, mobilised the Zaghawa in North Darfur.13 These vendettas have all the more impact on Zaghawa opinion in that they demonstrate a significant imbalance of power. On the Chadian side, the Zaghawa have greater impunity which enables them to act as they wish vis-à-vis a population that cannot take it any longer. On the Sudanese side, it is the Zaghawa who are the victims of the impunity of hostile groups.14 This discrepancy and this refusal to question the impunity are the reasons for the mobilisation and escalation in what then became the war of Darfur.
Following the publication of historical studies, Zaghawa intellectuals in the diaspora have been posing the problem of their people, who were ‘a people (today) without a State’ in spite of former grandeur; the Zaghawa were at the origin of the great sultanate of the IXth century and constituted the military basis of the sultanate of Darfur in at least parts of the XVIIIth and XIXth centuries. This debate, which mixes epic poetry, moral ethnicity, social memory and nationalist frustrations, has certainly played a role in the identification of the Zaghawa population with the cause of Darfur – without it being a question of forming a ‘Zaghawaland’ as the Sudanese regime claims. However there is certainly the idea held by some – not necessarily the leaders – of the possibility of reviving a glorious phase of their past.
The Zaghawa soon played a central role in the military groups of the insurgents, even if the Fur constitute the majority. The reason is, no doubt, because of their way of life, which is very close to that of the janjaweed, the Arab militia. But we should also take into account what is known as the Chadian transplant: some of the Zaghawa have spent years in the Chadian armed forces (the nomad guard, the republic guard, or just the army) and they can be sure of a supply from their former colleagues on the other side of the border and, soon, of refugee camps that will serve them as a pool for recruitment.15
State policies transnationalise the conflict
In Darfur, as in West Africa, the transnationalisation of war too often seems to conjure up informal arrangements, while hiding the practical role of the states in implementing them. Various states played an essential role in the meshing of the conflicts in Chad and Darfur. Some did so deliberately; for others it was more often the unintentional effects of their policies. For France, especially, it was certainly one more case of political shortsightedness.
At the beginning, Idriss Déby and Omar el-Bechir took on the challenge of cooperating closely on security to reduce what seemed to be, in early 2003, just an agglomeration of militia groups which were all equally hostile to the local administration set up by Khartoum and to certain Arab tribal chiefs. This collaboration had consequences that went well beyond what was originally anticipated. In fact, the displacing of population, the destruction of villages in Darfur and some clashes between insurgent groups were soon attributed to the two heads of state. In Chad, Idriss Déby was obviously held responsible for this policy which lost him still further support: the Kobé, in particular, regarded his continued presence as a humiliation after their leader, Abbas Koty was eliminated in 1993.16
An illustration of this cooperation and its rather surprising consequences has been the creation of the National Movement for Reform and Democracy (NMRD). This group brings together fighters who are essentially Zaghawa/Kapka who first belonged to the Justice and Equality Movement (JEM) of Khalil Ibrahim Mohamed (himself a Zaghawa Kobé). Déby, when he intervened to mediate, unsuccessfully tried to impose future leaders of the NMRD who were more conciliatory than Khalil and his partisans17 as the legitimate representatives of the JEM. In December 2004, while the negotiations at Abuja were dragging on, showing up the bad faith of Khartoum, the NMRD signed a peace agreement with the regime of el-Bechir, while attacking the JEM. The real founders of the NMRD, if they exist, are probably Hassan Borgo, a Sudanese Kapka, whose brother is director of radio al-Nasr at N'Djamena and a member of the Patriotic Movement for Salvation (MPS) and who is responsible for West Africa for the leading party in the Sudan, the National Congress, and, on the Chadian side, Mahamat Ismaël Chaïbo, another Kapka and, above all, director-general of the Chadian National Security Agency (ANS).
Of greater interest, perhaps because more difficult to understand, are Libyan and Eritrean policies. In the Darfur conflict Libya has two priorities. The first is to prevent foreign troops from crossing its frontiers. In spite of the diplomatic normalisation with the United Kingdom and the United States, which has been evident since 2004, the Libyan leader remains obsessed by the possibility of being assassinated, following the bombardment of Tripoli in 1986. He then came out of it unharmed but he lost his daughter and others close to him. The second priority is to appear as the only regional power that must be involved in the search for a solution to the conflict. To do this the Libyan leader has been mobilising networks that had become obsolete since the 1990s. These are the greater or lesser attachments to Abbas Koty, whose pro-Libyan sympathies were obvious, and those resulting from contacts with the Sudanese regime during the 1990s. Once again, the Zaghawa (ex?) Islamists of the JEM play a political role which goes well beyond the extent to which they are represented in the military or social field.
The case of Eritrea – and perhaps of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement – is less sophisticated, but as effective. The delivery of arms and munitions does not need much quibbling over. When certain Darfurian factions18 signed an alliance under the auspices of President Déby at N'djamena in January 2006, Abdallah Mohamud Jaber, adviser to President Issayas Afeworki on security matters, played an important role in the negotiations and rewarded the agreement by deliveries of arms and munitions to the armed movements that had signed it. For Eritrean rulers, a normalisation in Sudan means a weakening of their influence in the region at a time Addis Ababa and Khartoum are still allied. The signature of a peace agreement at Abuja on 5 May 2006 has not so far undermined the reciprocal linkages between the two Chad and Darfur conflicts. First, while much has been made of the disarmament of the janjaweed, no definition has been given to these militia. Since June 2004, the Sudanese government has signed at least three agreements to demobilise these groups but there has been massive recruitment in the new units of the border guards and of the people's defence forces. Some of the traditional leaders of Arab tribes have already announced that the disarmament agreement had nothing to do with them: they were obliged, by tradition, to carry arms. The fact that only one faction chief, Mini Arkoi Minawi, had signed, while the fact that Abdel Wahid, on whom the international community had been counting, abstained, as did the JEM leader, created considerable tensions.
A possible scenario – fortunately not the only one – is that this divergence risks degenerating into a battle line-up, with the Furs accusing the Zaghawa to have abandoned all serious claims in order to obtain leading positions in Darfur. Khartoum, unsurprisingly, tends to play this card. But the Chadian president has not been inactive either: he is allowing the forced recruitment in the refugee camps in Chad of fighters for the Darfurian movements and it seems that, at the end of May 2006 he helped to set up a new armed group whose mentor is none other than Sharif Harir, a Zaghawa university lecturer and a Sudanese dissident who is constantly acting against Mini within his ethnic group.
The Chadian crisis
When a column of Chadian rebels reached the gates of the capital on 12 April 2006, President Déby denounced the expedition as being led by Sudanese mercenaries – the explanation he has since been trying to get accepted at the international level. What population would wish to keep a leader in power who is ill and worn down by 15 years of rule without sharing, who has succeeded in guaranteeing impunity for his own and who has allowed Chad to become the most corrupt and poorest country in the world? With such a record, but not daring to face the internal opposition, Déby must necessarily blame foreign mercenaries: this is a well-tried stratagem that has often functioned in Africa, in Togo for example.
As we have just seen, many unofficial and then official links have been woven by Chad with the Darfurian opposition insurgents. While Déby seemed at one time to have played the game of Khartoum, he did so because he was paid handsomely in cash and then he changed his position. For many months, the Sudanese authorities have been accusing him of having played a double game right from the beginning of the conflict and to have followed Khartoum's directions only for profit while limiting the destructive effects on the Darfurian insurrection. The camps of the Chadian opponents were open in Darfur and near to Khartoum as from the summer of 2004 and the supplies they received were quickly stepped up the following year. It is difficult to pin down the exact date because the information given by Sudanese officials varies and, above all, cannot be verified.
At all events, the vote on resolutions 1591 and 1593 by the Security Council in March 2005 probably constituted a first stage in the rupture,19 after the publication of the Antonio Cassesse report at the end of January 2005. The changeover was complete when, in the autumn of 2005, the Zaghawa defections from the Republican Guard showed clearly the depth of the Chadian regime's crisis. After this date, even more than previously, it was a question of destroying the only military card left to the insurgents in Darfur: the possibility of sanctuary in Chad and the effective transnational guerrilla mobilisation of the Zaghawa.
Before going any further, it is perhaps appropriate, from a Chadian viewpoint, to recall a series of developments during the 1990s that had some political effects when the Darfur crisis broke out into armed conflict. Three can be mentioned here: the extent of armed factionalism in Chadian politics; the crisis within the Zaghawa, which was a hegemonic crisis; the game of Khartoum confronted with the twofold social marginalisation of the leading elites and fighting groups.
The importance of armed factionalism in Chadian political life
With the decline of Frolinat through the attacks of the French army at the beginning of the 1970s, the drought that affected the whole Sahel at that time, and all the internal divisions, a system of armed factions developed that proliferated thanks to international interventions, in the absence of stable power relationships and the permanent deconstruction of the state which was taken over by the winner of the moment and its partisans.
When Déby took power in December 1990 there was a much more favourable framework for stabilising the situation but he did not go through with it. This would have involved undertaking a genuine reconciliation with Chadian society, poorly reflected by the different military organisations which were the object of Déby's attentions, through both co-optation and repression. While such an approach might have brought about a stable government, it would not have authorised impunity for the head of state and those closest to him. It would also have meant putting the state structures to work, a government – and not a president – that governed, an army and police force that were strong but that respected the laws, etc.
The main argument for justifying the continuation of the old practices of government was the continuing attempts at coups d'etat and the constitution of armed groups with claims that were often unrealistic. While this argument is indisputable, it is politically biased because the Chadian president acted from the start so as to reinforce the idea that the only claims that obtained something were those brought about by arms: the leaders of these revolts were then designated to some high public function and even became ministers, while their partisans were absorbed into an oversized army that fed off the population.20
The systematic pillage in Chad was thus the result of the singular pattern of the social and political system that Idriss Déby did all he could to preserve and which can be summed up, as Marielle Debos has suggested, as the permanence of the social status of the armed man, whatever function he has – customs officer, soldier, gendarme, policeman, customs fighter, highwayman, freedom fighter at large, as well as small-scale bandit.21
If friends of Chad, France especially, had a genuine aid policy, they should have tried to break this vicious circle by which political change only came about through violence and they should have done everything to facilitate the departure of Idriss Déby from power, according to the regulations of a legitimate constitution at the end of a popular vote respecting international standards. Since 2003, at least on the French side, this has not been the aim, nor the practice, as can be seen from the declarations of Xavier Darcos congratulating the Chadian president for reforming the constitution which enabled him to win a third mandate as head of state,22 and from the continuing support so clearly given to him during the recent presidential elections which were a perfect example of vote-rigging.
Hubris & stasis among the Zaghawa
While the political system remained generally static during the reign of Idriss Déby, there were nevertheless some changes in Chad, for example the opening to a multiparty system and the emergence of civil society. Much could be said about the weakness and shortsightedness of these various organisations and even more about their difficulties simply to exist in a system that only tolerates individual strategies and a clientelism that sometimes employs the coercitive methods of the past.
The 1990s saw a much greater increase in social differentiation among the Zaghawa than in the previous decades, for various reasons. On the Chadian side, the access of one of them to state power automatically authorised preferential treatment and the ‘capture’ of positions enabling accumulation by many Zaghawa, both in the economic field and in direct spoliation (customs and extortion) within the state apparatus. The exploitation of oil fields that started in 200323 only extended the possibilities of monopolisation, even if it meant the World Bank losing face. These facilities are not equally shared in the Zaghawa world which possesses its wealthy, its corrupted and its predators, but also its poor, its rebels and its honest ones.24
On the Sudanese side, there are several dynamics at work. Under the influence of one of the first Zaghawa state officials, a teacher, many young people during the sixties and seventies joined the Muslim Brothers and their sympathies for Tourabi gradually enabled them to acquire influential posts. In Sudanese society, more than in Chad, there is a lot of migration for work outside national frontiers. A number of Zaghawa are to be found in the commercial networks in the Gulf and in Asia, carrying out import-export activities as from the 1980s. The fact that the Islamist regime was subjected, after 1989, to international pressures facilitated and indeed accelerated this trend, so much so that the sanctions are, for some, a godsend. This can be measured by the importance that the ‘Libyan market’ took on in the Sudanese capital, although we must not forget the Zaghawa trading communities established in the Kordofan and the east of the country.
This primitive accumulation, which to some extent follows the regulations of ethnic business, is carried out transnationally. Not only are Zaghawa obtaining important positions in the commercial networks which, from the Gulf or from Malta, keep the Sudanese market supplied, but they become share-holders in companies that are based in these countries. For example, in 2000 an important Sudanese Zaghawa businessman ‘bought out’ the only soap and oil factory in Chad. Likewise, the murder of a Sudanese businessman in N'djamena in October 2003 and the execution, in very questionable circumstances of a presumed assassin, reveal the economic ties between the Zaghawa in the two countries.
Thus, over the last fifteen years the Zaghawa world has become more differentiated thanks to its proximity to the state and to politics. On the Sudanese side, the Zaghawa have benefited from the social reclassifying authorised by the Islamic National Front when it came to power: reclassifications that are now oversimplified, reduced to the supposed support for Arabism of the present leaders of the National Congress, as described in the famous ‘Black Book’ that can be read on the JEM's web site.25 In Chad, integration is weaker, as it directly depends on the control of the state and not enough on the ‘soft power’ that could bring about the education and emergence of a class of non-parasitic economic operators. Also, the emergence of new social strata that are better integrated socially makes the ordinary Zaghawa more fragile.
The opposition to Idriss Déby is long-standing and is based on contradictory criticisms of his behaviour, both public and private. Without going into too much detail on this subject, three aspects should be cited – on top of what has already been mentioned. The first is his reneging on the promise he made in 2001, at the end of disastrous elections, that he would not stand for another mandate. The barons of the regime then hoped to see an end to the degradation of state management and also – especially – the possibility of one of them acceding one day to the position of president. Déby's health having become very fragile – he fell into a coma during the summit of the African Union in Maputo in July 2003 and, since then, goes regularly to France for health care – no one can understand why he hangs on so tenaciously and does not organise the transfer of power. One can only laugh at the claim, repeated by French diplomacy during the crisis of April 2006, that there is no credible alternative, which merely reflects a pathetic colonial attitude. Can one imagine an autocrat allowing an alternative to emerge? Hardly.
A second aspect was Déby's desire to set up a Bideyat chefferie, the leadership of which he would give to one of his brother Timan. This was equally unacceptable to the Zaghawa and their overweening pride. The last point is his very muddled, but concerned attitude to the Darfur conflict as it has developed: several times he tried to arrest Zaghawa members of the JEM and send them to Khartoum, which has created enmity, not only among the partisans of these Darfurians.
On 16 May 2004 an attempted coup d'état was only just averted. It developed within the Republican Guard, but concerned only the Bideyat as the Kobé, who were well represented in this praetorian guard of the regime, preferred to maintain their neutrality at the time. In fact, because of the very bad relations between the JEM and the Chadian presidency, they feared manipulation aimed at eliminating them, as had already happened to Abbas Koty. While no disciplinary measures were taken, there were many changes in the following months and throughout the state apparatus officers suspected of treachery were penalised, as well as their relatives.
The Zaghawa continued to defect as from October 2005 which led to several armed groups taking refuge in Darfur, particularly the Platform for Change, Unity and Democracy (SCUD), led by Yaya Dillo, and the Rally for Peace and Justice (RPJ) of Abakar Tollimi. This desertion from the ranks of Déby's first circle of supporters continued, in spite of denials by his partisans and the buying back of some dissenters. Almost every month since October, some Zaghawa who were well known, or not so well known, joined the Zaghawa opponents now federated in the Rally of Democratic Forces (RaFD) led by a former director of the president's civil cabinet, Timan Erdimi.
After having convinced the French that he stood above his ethnic group, that he was, so to speak, the only real Chadian, the only person who could prove his genuine nationalism and embrace the whole nation, Idriss Déby, who had not used the name of his grandfather for more than two decades, made it known, by a presidential decree in March 2006, that his name was Idriss Déby Itno. This was to recall to the members of the Itno that they owed him support – all the more so that in February 2006 one of his first cousins had defected with the former chief of the armed forces, General Seby Aguid.
Earlier, in January, he had sponsored an agreement between the Darfur personalities who best represented this transnational dimension of the Sudanese conflict: Khalil Ibrahim, Mini Arkoi Minawi and Khamis Abdallah Abakar. Khalil and Mini signed the agreement to facilitate their political survival: if Idriss Déby fell all their logistical help would disappear and Khartoum would be that much stronger. But it was also another demonstration – albeit a measured one – of Zaghawa solidarity. For the Kobé, to help the Chadian regime, weakened by the divisions among the Bideyat, it also meant making a date for the future in the president's circle. As for Mini, whose group does not have the same ties to Chad, it meant exchanging one guarantee for another: camps and arms against support in case of destabilisation coming from Darfur.
The case of Khamis, even if he is a Masalit and his group had no privileged access to power in Chad, was resorting to the same logic: if he suffered military defeat in western Darfur, he could guarantee a warm welcome in Chad for his followers, as well as obtain access to arms, munitions and preferential treatment that would enable him to return to the offensive in Darfur and exist politically, while the Abuja negotiations took their course. After the signing of the Abuja negotiations by Mini Arkoi Minanwi at the end of May, Khamis was in N'Djamena and subjected to pressure from the Chadian president; few of his colleagues doubted that his declarations against the Abuja agreement were inspired by his host, as everyone recalled the divisive role the latter had reserved for Sharif Harir.26
Khartoum faced with the double social marginality of the elites & fighter groups
The situation of the armed groups of the Chadian opposition is somewhat paradoxical. Inside Chad it is evident that the regime of Idriss Déby is politically (but not militarily) moribund, in the absence of political initiatives or the ability to conceive of political alliances other than the buying of individual allegiances. Outside, in Darfur and more marginally in the extreme north of the country and in the Central African Republic, the armed groups are supported only by relatively small ethnic groups. Besides the Toubous, who are fighting in the extreme north under the leadership of the Movement for Democracy and Justice in Chad, it is necessary to count on the Borogate and the Zaghawa.
The largest opposition group, or the one that benefits most openly from the support of Sudanese military intelligence, the United Front for Democratic Change (FUCD, symptomatically often reduced to FUC), led by Mahamat Nour, recruits mainly from among the Tama,27 other Ouaddaiens and Arabs. It suffered two stinging military defeats at Adré on 18 December 2005 and at N'Djamena on 13 April 2006, even if politically it was a different story. Déby clearly stays in power only thanks to a French military intervention, the legality of which is very questionable, although it has not been challenged by French parliamentarians. After this battle journalists were surprised to see men from the Central African Republic among the FUC fighters. This was not altogether surprising: they were Chadians in April 2003 when General Bozizé had to be installed in power at Bangui, with the blessing of the Chadian and French presidents. Journalists could also observe that many of the companions of this expedition's chief, Colonel Mahamat Issa, were fighters that came mainly from the Ouaddai, who had once followed Adoum Yakoub and lived in the area bordering the three frontiers (Sudan, Chad, Central African Republic) and then found themselves under the protection of John Garang's movement before disappearing to take up the struggle again in Darfur in 2005.
As this brief summary shows, there is a sociological reality that cannot be ignored: all Chadian armed groups today rely on ethnic groups who all together represent less than 15 per cent of the Chadian population, except for the Arab groups who themselves could represent between 15 and 20 per cent of the Chadian population. This sociological marginality is one of the causes of Khartoum's influence. It reflects the tenuous legitimacy of the leading Chadian elites and also explains the gap between political life and a large part of the population. Optimists consider this a sign of the victory of the political parties of the civil opposition which finally, in spite of their divisions, have exposed the hollowness of a regime as well as that of an armed opposition that does not offer a real alternative.
The involvement in these two crises of the Chadian Arabs, who represent between 15 and 20 per cent of the Chadian population, should be analysed in depth. A first observation would be that there is not just one position, either in the present tensions or in the previous episodes of the Chadian civil war. Part of the Arab community was with Déby until the attack of the FUC on the capital. But his behaviour was then dictated by clan allegiances: while Zaghawa civilians were armed to defend ‘their’ regime, some of the Arab and Gorane officers were disarmed and even arrested during the fighting. Already contested, the popularity of the Chadian president was not increased among the last of the faithful.
The fact that important political figures are now taking up armed opposition has been made more complex by the conflict in Sudan. The case of Ahmat Soubiane Hassaballa, Chadian Ambassador to Washington who defected in December 2003, illustrates this difficulty. He was an important personality among the Mahamid but it was impossible for him to establish himself in Sudan without having relations with those responsible for the janjaweed, which would have destroyed the political credibility that he had built up for himself during the 1990s in Chad and abroad. Not only that, Idriss Déby was able to convince some French officials and perhaps himself that this whole crisis was an attack by the Arabs who, after getting control of Chad and mistreating Africans, would be pushing towards Niger and Nigeria to upset societies in those countries. It is surprising that this supermarket approach to geopolitics received the attention of some French civil and military decision-makers.
It has, however, to be acknowledged that in only one sense it is valid, even though the form in which it is expressed is unacceptable. This view, indistinct as it is, gives a glimpse of a transformation in the Chadian elites. While they were francophones and francophiles in the 1960s, since Habré and even more since Déby, they have become much more arabophone and, marginally, anglophone. The French-speaking world and francophilia suffer from well-known illnesses in Chad, as elsewhere on the African continent. They have little to do with the geopolitics of Arab nomads rushing towards the beaches of West Africa and much to do with the new economic polarisations,28 the giving of visas and scholarships and, last but not least, the regional origin of the present elites of Chad, in the absence of political rivalry and a functional meritocracy. It is interesting to note the ‘admirable’ similarity with another case just after the Rwandan genocide: the discourse about the colonial ambitions of the Hamites coming down from their Ethiopian hills to destroy the Bantu in the Great Lakes and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
This ‘strategic’ vision poses a number of questions which need answering. What can the status of Chadian Arabs be in their country if, as soon as they oppose the current regime, they are nothing more than the auxiliaries of Libya (yesterday), or Sudan (today)? How to explain why the French government and its president, so enamoured of justice and stability, maintained – until the summer of 2004 – extremely cordial relations with a Sudanese regime which, after 15 years of existence, decided to destabilise Niger, Nigeria, Mali and – why not? – some countries of central Africa? How can one believe in such pitiful arguments, lacking any basis in facts, when one of the recurrent weaknesses of the FUCD is its incapacity to organise Arab groups who are all hostile to Déby but jealous of their independence? This instrumentalisation of the ‘Arab threat’ goes along with another, more internal approach stressed by Déby: ‘Me or chaos’, a saying that many Chadians, not all involved in politics, render as ‘Me and chaos’.
Has the role of Khartoum been exaggerated in the military incidents taking place to the east of Chad and in the border zone with the Central African Republic? Certainly not, but it should be gauged with precision. According to Hassan Borgo,29 at the beginning of the Darfur conflict, the Sudanese intelligence services invited in their foreign counterparts – at least those with which they had the closest relations. One of them would then have explained that the real threat was created by the Zaghawa, who have the support of a state – for Sudan the regime of Déby was nothing more than a Zaghawa state. The Zaghawa are to be found on both sides of the frontier and are excellent fighters. The aim today is thus to get rid of Déby because, either by choice or through powerlessness, he cannot control his followers and their excesses. For Sudan, or at least for its military intelligence services, the solution to the war in Darfur is to be found in N'djamena, rather like in 1989 and 1990 when the victory against the SPLM would be won through the toppling of Mengistu Haile Mariam in Addis Ababa.
Conclusion
Various scenarios can now develop. If the same international passivity and French shortsightedness towards Idriss Déby and his adventures continue, it is very probable that a war of attrition will develop along the eastern borders of Chad. Khartoum thinks that its national security is at stake and will not allow Déby to act as he is doing at present. From this viewpoint, the Abuja agreement can encourage new confrontations rather than solve the overall problem. This fighting may take place between the Zaghawa themselves or between the Zaghawa and the Fur. It will render the Abuja agreement unworkable, which would not make Khartoum unhappy. This is, today, the most likely scenario.
Another possibility is that Déby, under international pressure, will offer positions to leaders of the civil opposition and at the same time do all he can to ensure that the UN force destined for Darfur install its rearguard base in Chad. If this were to happen there could be consequences that would do no credit to the reputation of the international community. The civil opposition is very reluctant to accept an agreement of this kind as long as it is convinced (with good reason) that it would lose its soul, gain little money and much dishonour, and that it would only strengthen the armed groups of the opposition. As for the international presence, it would rapidly become hostage to the settling of scores which would take place in the border zone. It would not have the mandate to intervene but would be exposed to stray bullets and held responsible for all the massacres that would take place.
It is also possible, although unlikely, that the international actors will develop a more critical view of their own position: that they (including the French government) will abandon certain current axioms in their policies towards Chad and Darfur and accept approaching the two crises simultaneously (and perhaps a third one, if the Central African Republic also goes the same way). Before launching a whole new operation, they should at the same time promote what the Abuja agreement calls for, a conference between Darfurian actors and a national dialogue in Chad, in order to increase the advantages of a simultaneous review, starting from scratch, of the problems of the two countries, so that the two regimes cannot count on the indifference of the international community to undo progress on the other side. This would be politically consistent and encourage, more than has happened to date, the protagonists in these crises to decide how their futures must be rooted, in Chad and in Darfur, but always peacefully.