Last week, Chad saw rebel forces pour into its capital city of N’Djamena, sparking a long and bloody battle with government troops, which resulted in the eventual retreat of the rebels. According to The Economist, rotting bodies still dot the city’s streets and BBC News reports that residents of N’Djamena face a nightly dusk-to-dawn curfew. Already, hordes of Chadians have taken advantage of the current lull in the fighting to escape to the neighboring country of Cameroon. For those who stay on, there is little hope that another round of conflict can be avoided, meaning that additional suffering and dislocation is almost a given.
On the face of the matter, it would seem that the rebels have an extremely legitimate case for their violent actions. Chad’s president, Idriss Deby, happens to be one of Africa’s unreconstructed kleptocratic tyrants. He stands accused of rigging elections to remain in power and siphoning off Chad’s burgeoning oil wealth for his personal benefit and for the development of his military, ignoring the abject poverty of the vast majority of Chadians.
Deby unapologetically favors members of his own clan, the Zagawa, which comprises a mere three percent of the country’s population, according to BBC News. He places cronies in influential positions in both the army and the bureaucracy, allowing them to share in the ill-gotten gains of his regime. Transparency International rated Chad the world’s most corrupt country in 2005; currently, it ranks in the same league as such shining political paragons as Myanmar, Haiti and Somalia.
Nonetheless, Western governments and the United Nations have rallied to support this less than savory character against the rebel alliance that threatens his rule. The reason for this seemingly undeserved support lies not in the nature of Deby’s regime in N’Djamena, but rather hundreds of miles to the east, in the Sudanese province of Darfur.
However justified their grievances against the Chadian government, Deby’s rebel foes are the clients of Omar al-Bashir’s Sudanese government. Sudan, as most in the West are by now aware, has perpetrated the murder of upwards of 400,000 black residents of Darfur and the displacement of millions more. In response to Chad’s aid and support for the Darfuri resistance against the Sudanese government, Sudan has been providing the Chadian rebels with a whole range of supplies. According to BBC News, this aid includes weapons, munitions, uniforms and medical assistance. For this reason, the Chadian rebels are beholden to Bashir and his genocidal regime
Deby, by contrast, has ethnic ties to the people of Darfur, and has provided the refugees from that stricken province a relatively safe haven in Chadian refugee camps. Chad’s rebels, though, have no such sympathy for Darfur’s refugees, especially given the Darfur rebels’ ties with Deby’s regime. Should the Chadian rebels gain control of all or a significant part of the country, they would be more likely to allow the Sudanese a free hand with the Darfuri refugees.
Additionally, rebel victories would thwart the European Union’s mission to emplace peacekeeping troops and protect the refugees from Darfur. To be effective, the peacekeepers must operate in eastern Chad, where the rebels are the strongest. If Sudan’s clients seize effective control in that region, the European Union would have a slim chance of placing any troops to protect the refugee camps, let alone providing meaningful security along the Chad-Darfur border. Shorn of Western protection and at the mercy of their tormentors, the situation for the Darfuris would be grim. This could lead to a new outbreak of bloodletting and displacement at the hands of the merciless janjaweed and their backers in the Sudanese army and government. If the Darfuris have to flee anew from hostile control in Chad, the crisis could spread throughout the country and would most likely destabilize neighboring nations like Cameroon.
Therefore, the West has both a moral and a strategic imperative to continue to back Idriss Deby, regardless of the tawdry nature of his regime. France should take the leading role in supporting the Chadian government. As Chad’s former colonial rulers, the French are well positioned to provide military and intelligence aid to Deby, as they have done in the past. Simultaneously, they could do the Chadian people a service by using their leverage with Deby and influencing him to adopt democratic reforms. Specifically, they could pressure him to make an accord with moderate opposition leaders and distribute oil wealth more equitably. If he can achieve an outcome remotely approximating Chadian internal reform, French president Nicholas Sarkozy will have gone a long way towards extricating France from the unfortunate international gadfly role it played under Jacques Chirac.
Even if France and its Western allies can simply preserve the status quo, hundreds of thousands of lives will probably be saved. Readers with a belief in unshakable diplomatic rectitude will probably cringe at the necessity of bolstering a regime as slimy as Deby’s. However, given the choice between a crook and a killer, anyone with a humanitarian bent should opt for the crook. Sadly, such a dilemma is often the reality in much of Africa. In Chad, as in countries like Congo, Zimbabwe, Somalia and Kenya, the options are not good and evil, but bad and worse.