Chad/Darfur: COC Podcast With David Buchbinder

The most recent podcast from the Committee on Conscience with David Buchbinder, a researcher at Human Rights Watch

JERRY FOWLER: Human Rights Watch issued a report very recently on Chad and one of its recommendations was the deployment of a robust, international military force along the border, along with human rights monitors, along the Chad-Sudan border. I think most people who have listened to this program have heard a lot about the idea of a military force in Darfur and the fact that is seems to be held up by Sudanese opposition. What are the obstacles to deploying a force along the Chad-Sudan border, deliberately on the Chad side of the border?

DAVID BUCHBINDER: The obstacles are numerous, but they are different from the obstacles that have prevented a United Nations force from deploying to Darfur. The key difference between deploying a force to Darfur and deploying a force to Eastern Chad is that of consent. The biggest hurdle of deploying to Darfur has been that the Sudanese government has the pleasure of consenting to this force, and it has not consented, and as a result, that force has basically, to summarize, not been able to deploy. In Eastern Chad, there is a greater chance that the Chadian government would consent to that, although they have not given a green light to that exactly. They say they agree in principle to the deployment of the force, but there are some reservations on the part of the Chadian government, aside from internal splits within the government. I think that one concern that Chad has is that they are afraid that that Eastern Chad border force would be used as a stepping stone into Darfur for the United Nations, and they do not want to do that in my understanding.

JERRY FOWLER: The Chadian government does not want to do that?

DAVID BUCHBINDER: Yes, in my understanding, the Chadian government is concerned that that should not happen.

JERRY FOWLER: Because that would increase their conflict with Khartoum?

DAVID BUCHBINDER: Presumably; of course the Chadian government has not had qualms about supporting Sudanese rebels—these are the Sudanese rebels that have been fighting against Sudanese government forces in Darfur—but it seems that, and again this is speculation because I do not know what the motivation of the Chadian government is, but that they would not want to push Khartoum that far.

That is one hurdle. Another hurdle is political will. The United Nations Security Council appears to be determined to do something about the problem in Chad, and not strictly vis-à-vis the problem in Darfur. It has become apparent with time that while there is a strong cross-border element to the problems that we have been seeing in Eastern Chad that Chad has problems of its own. The Security Council wants to do something; whether it will be able to do that is another question. Right now the Security Council has deployed a technical assessment mission—the second such mission in the last couple of months—and that mission is going to Eastern Chad and northeastern Central African Republic, and they are going to assess the possibility of deploying this force to Eastern Chad and northeastern Central African Republic, but the problem that they have with this is that there is no peace to keep in Eastern Chad in this area, and the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations just hates going into a situation like that; they would much rather have some kind of peace treaty in place between the Chadian government and the Chadian rebels, and once that happened, they would be much more happy about going out there to Eastern Chad with some kind of military force to protect civilians.

That is another hurdle. One final thing would be the troop contributors. While the Security Council may want to do something about Eastern Chad, they may not also want to be the ones to be contributing the soldiers to man this force, so the question is who is that going to be, and there is no answer yet.

JERRY FOWLER: It sounds like from all of those things the prospect of deploying any kind of force to the border may be quite a ways off.

DAVID BUCHBINDER: Yes, I think that is a good way to put it. I do not think that these challenges are insurmountable, but it appears that this is not going to be something that happens very quickly.