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A bi-weekly audio series and podcast service, hosted by Committee on Conscience Project Director Bridget Conley-Zilkic, that brings you the voices of human rights defenders, experts, advocates, and government officials. Vital voices addressing one of humanity's most vital issues. The opinions expressed in these interviews do not necessarily represent those of the Museum.
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4/15/06
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Chad seems to have fought off an attack by Sudanese backed rebels, for now. President Idriss Deby's threat to expel the 200,000+ Darfurian refugees in eastern Chad is both ominous and a sign of how seriously he takes the rebels' challenge to his regime's existence. (He's also threatening to cut off Chad's oil exports -- probably not enough to disrupt international oil markets but a definite inconvenience to Exxon Mobil and other companies that spent billions to build a pipeline to pump the oil through Cameroon.) After all, he came to power 16 years ago by attacking from Darfur with Khartoum's support. Human Rights Watch recently reported on the details of Darfur's violence spilling over into Chad. Their conclusion:
The crisis in Darfur, Sudan, which has been trickling into Chad for the better part of three years, is now bleeding freely across the border. A counterinsurgency carried out by the Sudanese government and its militias against rebel groups in Darfur, characterized by war crimes and “ethnic cleansing,” has forcibly displaced almost two million civilians in Darfur and another 220,000 people who have fled across the border into Chad. The same ethnic “Janjaweed” militias that have committed systematic abuses in Darfur have staged cross-border raids into Chad, attacking Darfurian refugees and Chadian villagers alike, seizing their livestock and killing those who resist.
The government of Sudan is actively exporting the Darfur crisis to its neighbor by providing material support to Janjaweed militias and by failing to disarm or control them, by backing Chadian rebel groups that it allows to operate from bases in Darfur, and by deploying its own armed forces across the border into Chad.
Update (April 17) -- President Deby has backed off his threat to expel Darfurian refugees.
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