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Sudan: Darfur Rebels Rejoice As Bid to Seize Power in Chad Flops
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The Nation (Nairobi)
14 February 2008
Posted to the web 14 February 2008
Dean Diyan
Juba
For Darfur rebels, the victory party over the defeat of Chadian rebels come too early.
On February 5, hours after it emerged that Chadian rebels out to overthrow the government had been beaten back, Sudan's Darfur rebels revelled in the moment.
The irony is not easily lost. A rebel group, seeking to overthrow a government, felt nauseated by another rebel's attempts to overturn another government, and gloated when those attempts came to naught.
An email photo of Sudan's Defence Minister Abdel Rahim Hesain snivelling into what looked like a napkin went around. "Too painful to lose Chad," read the caption.
The Justice and Equality Movement (JEM), which sent the photograph, is considered the militarily strongest of the four major Darfur rebel movements.
The other group, the Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) is considered the more politically savvy, but it is split into myriad factions.
Resigned to fate
During the fighting in Chad, while the other groups seemed resigned to fate, JEM, with perhaps more at stake to lose if Sudan-backed rebels overthrew Idriss Deby's regime, did all the touting and shouting as Chad beat back rebels who had slogged their way to the capital town, N'Djamena.
"At exactly the same time when the Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was concluding a peace agreement between Khartoum and Chad, Mr Abdel Rahim Hesain, Sudan's Minister for Defence, was plotting in El Gineina city, organising the current abortive invasion of Chad," Mr Ahmed Adam Bakheit, the Justice and Equality Movement Secretary for Political Affairs/Darfur Sector, said in a statement.
"Gaddafi should now contemplate his true weight on Khartoum government and the futility of taking el-Bashir for his words."
Mr Bakheit said the Darfur rebel stand against the fighting in N'Djamena was based on humanitarianism. The Darfur rebel movement noted that, despite its meagre resources, Chad was host to a sizable chunk of refugees from Darfur, driven out of their homes by Khartoum Government and its Janjaweed allies.
The rebel movement argued that the current instability is likely to aggravate this situation and lead to a new crisis of Chadian refugees in the area.
On February 9, the UN Humanitarian Affairs office in Chad put the figure of new refugees at 30,000, as the world body continued planning for 50,000 refugees.
The irony is that only last November, the UN criticised the Darfur rebels, as they claimed winning decisive battle after decisive battle against the Sudan government, for displacing people in Darfur.
The Darfur rebels said they oppose the Chadian offensive because of the need for good neighbourliness.
JEM said it denounces 'in the strongest term el-Bashir's latest military gamble to change the political system in Chad and impose a puppet government in N'Djamena, the capital of Chad."
The rebels said they were extremely concerned and equally saddened by the unnecessary death caused by Khartoum's intervention in internal Chadian affairs; "an intervention that has to be seen in the light of desired good neighbourly relations, common ethnic relations and international conventions."
"JEM is committed to good neighbourly relations and creation of (an) environment that is conducive to peaceful border coexistence between Chadian and Sudanese people," the Darfur rebel leader said. "This blatant intervention has now put this goal in serious jeopardy."
But then again Chad has been bank rolling Sudan's Darfur rebels.
Jean-Marie Guehenno, the head of the UN peacekeeping operations, while addressing the UN Security Council last week, said the fighting in Chad and Darfur was a proxy war with each country using the other side's rebels.
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The cliffhanger was this: "JEM reminds el-Bashir yet again that Africa has to put an end to military piracy, coup culture and undemocratic change of political governments in the continent."
Put another way, a rebel group plotting to take power was condemning the very action of fighting to take power, a blow-back to its own very existence.
The ironies during the course of the Chad/Darfur conflicts in the past week have had all the hallmarks of the theatre of the absurd.
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