The news from bits of the world we don't care about

A couple of years ago I wrote a report about American "counter-terrorism" operations in the Saharan belt of Africa. It was fascinating research because I got time to read up on countries I knew basically absolutely nothing about and amongst them were Chad and Mauritania.

Last week there was a(nother) military coup in Mauritania, an activity they seem rather fond of. And then today the court system of one authoritarian leader of Chad sentenced a previous authoritarian leader of Chad to death.

I don't really have any point to make beyond it's odd how little we care. The British team is doing great at the Olympics, the Russians are back in business as the global baddies and the weather is kinda crappy and all of that is for some reason more important for the media. Does art imitate life or does life imitate art in this case? Who knows, but good luck to the British 400 mtr boys in the semis tomorrow!

EUFOR Chad: this isn't going to end well

I happened to be interviewing a Finnish Ministry of Defence official this morning on a totally unconnected issue, but he mentioned in passing that the just deployed EU mission to Chad, which includes Finnish troops, requires a particularly highly trained level of soldier due to the political and cultural complexity of the situation and the very harsh operating climate. After today's terrible events it might be a start if their training covered map reading. An EUFOR jeep strayed into Sudan, got shot at, one of the two soldiers in the vehicle is now missing and a rescue/recovery party was also fired on and seem to have returned fire killing one or two Sudanese.

The speed at which the EU managed to get together the mission is best described as glacial, what they actually want to achieve in a politically contorted environment is vague at best, and as an under-secretary for UN peace-keeping said at a seminar I went to last week - the EU powers are already talking cynically about the UN being their "exit strategy" from any Chadian quagmire. The same guy said that looking from the outside, the EU seems to use up so much political energy coming to a decision internally that it has little left for dynamism internationally. You get the feeling the EU isn't taking this very seriously.

Finland and the EU Security Guarantees

There has recently been much, much interest amongst the Finnish political class about the supposed "EU Security Guarantees" that are perhaps, or perhaps not, in the Lisbon treaty (check this article and the links at the bottom, or these search results). After much early scepticism, the interest in them has swung in the opposite direction to a nearly-religious faith in the idea, despite the fact that no other EU member seems to take the idea centrally in their security planning. Why the sudden conversion? Because, almost ironically, the EU is not NATO. When the voters and the elites seem to be worrying that the country has some sort of security deficit (again, a problematic assumption in itself), the politicians want to respond but know they can't touch the third rail of Finnish politics and say "lets think about joining NATO!". Suggesting even considering NATO, regardless of all evidence on the ground as to what NATO now is and what is it likely to become, marks the politician out as a neo-imperialist, Yankee-loving, war-mongering, running-dog - or something along those lines. The Finnish NATO debate is about whether or not to join a NATO that hasn't existed for the best part of a decade. Joining that NATO may well be a good or not good idea for Finland, but the debate seems somewhat academic as that NATO doesn't exist.

But back to the EU. How seriously should we take the security guarantees? As yet - and things can change - not very seriously. If the EU won't send peacekeeping troops to Chad because of - errrr... - fighting that is taking place there, I can't imagine those in the Kremlin is having any sleepless nights over the massing EU armies forming on their western borders. The Chad situation - something that this blog has followed a bit in the past - is interesting in itself (for an excellent pithy briefing on the subject listen to this week's Instant Guide), but it also reflects a non-"robustness" (to use my favourite security policy euphemism) in the current, at least, EU approach to security.

More Chad - last for today

Earlier reports that a French Mirage fired warning shots at the rebel column advancing on N'Djamena seemed to have changed into them dropping a bomb. According to the French MoD spokesman, this was OK as it "landed in the sand" and didn't hurt anyone, it was just a warning bomb. The idea of warning shots is hardly new, but a warning bomb seems, well, you'd be pretty silly not to take the point.

Deby is claiming all of the capital is under his government's control and journalists were shown a relatively small number of dead bodies said to be rebels that were clearly designed to make this point.

I have only just noticed, but the rebel group being called in English "the FUC" is about the only funny side to this story.

More on Chad - update "...with all the coups and stuff..."

I should read my own sources before posing questions. The Washington Post article I referenced from last July notes the following:

"The U.S.-trained battalion is commanded by Deby's nephew, Maj. Hardja Idriss, and is part of a regiment assigned to protect an authoritarian and the increasingly unpopular president. Deby survived an attempted coup last year, and his grip on power remains fragile. "It just makes sense. They're the president's guard, and in this region, will all the coups and stuff, you'd want them the best trained" said Capt. Jason, the [U.S. military training] team leader."

Some refreshing honesty there from Capt. Jason! I guess that pretty much answers my question on who's side the U.S. trained troops will be on.

Deby is still saying he is in control despite the fighting in N'Djamena.

More on Chad

News moves quickly. I was listening to World Service eating breakfast at home and they mentioned that the newly formed rebel alliance in Chad, the FUC, was advancing towards the capital N’Djamena. Checking on the net, the NYT and BBC had pieces on the advance but were still saying that the rebels had raided a town called Mongo, about halfway between the eastern border with Sudan and the western capital. Having cycled into work, taken a shower and had my coffee, I looked again to see that news sites around the world are covered with wire reports that fighting has broken out in the capital itself. This is coming from multiple sources including the BBC and Reuters. It seems possible now that Deby is never going to make it to the elections scheduled for May. Although Deby has been re-elected a couple of times he came to power in coup. The BBC points out that power has never been transferred by the ballot box in Chad in 46 years since independence, and it clearly looks like the FUC don’t intend for that ‘tradition’ to change.

I mentioned the French presence in Chad in my previous post. The French are reinforcing their troop numbers there and, according to BBC World Service, have been relaying reconnaissance intelligence to the government from their Mirage fighters over-flying the rebel advance. The BBC correspondent suggested it was unlikely that the French troops would actually get involved in fighting (rescue the white people seems to be their most-likely role if Rwanda and Cote d’Ivoire are anything to go by), but in the NYT a French Foreign Ministry spokesman condemned the rebel attempt to change regimes by force and said that Chad was an “anchor for the stability of the continent as a whole”. The NYT doesn’t note if he managed that line with a straight face.

I started taking an interest in this otherwise rather obscure part of the world due to research I have been doing on the US military involvement in the Sahel/Sahara region under a programme called the TSCTI or the Trans-Saharan Counter-Terrorism Initiative. The US has been in Chad and has trained a small number of troops (see Washington Post 26 July 2006 “US Pushes Anti-Terrorism in Africa”). The BBC’s reporter was saying that it isn’t yet clear how much of the Chadian army is sticking with Deby and how many have joined the rebels, but it will be interesting to see what happens with the US trained troops. One of the worries about the TSCTI was that the US was arming and training small groups in all the Sahelian countries’ militaries that could be central in future coup attempts, due to their superior skills and equipment. Of course the opposite could be true: that these troops end up successfully defending the government. We shall see.

Chad - where even a little hope is now failing

Some time ago I read an article on how Africa’s newest oil producer, Chad, was working with the World Bank on a project that would ensure it’s new found, if somewhat limited, oil resources would be used for the general development of the country. Oil tends to be more of a curse in Africa than a blessing, but could the World Bank stop this unhappy tradition?

As a Chadian observer puts its: “This project could not survive contact with the reality of Chad” (Gilbert Maoundonodji, who runs a Chadian NGO, talking to the NYT). That reality is a president, Idriss Deby, who came to power by a coup, whose legitimacy has only marginally increased after being returned in two dubious elections, is losing control of the country as supporters defect to rebel groups that are in open revolt in the east of the country. Chad is being sucked into the misery of Darfur, the neighbouring region of Sudan where massacres amounting to genocide have been on-going over the last three years. Chad accuses the Sudanese of supporting the rebels in an attempt to overthrow the Deby government. Meanwhile Sudan accuses Chad of sheltering rebels which they claim are destabilising Darfur, who they additionally claim the infamously murderous Janjaweed militias are simply defending against.

The Deby regime now want to use its oil wealth to buy weapons. If one is charitable you could say this is to help defend Chad and maintain order, whilst the cynics would suggest it is to continue their hold on power. Whatever the reason, and the two are perhaps not so different, the World Bank has said no and will not pay out any more money from the accounts it holds for Chad. The Chadian government has suggested that Exxon, its partner in exploiting the oil, should transfer its royalties directly to the government, not into the World Bank managed account, whilst a Chadian minister hinted that there are “other partners we can pursue” presumably meaning China (see the end of this article), which has expressed an interest, and has shown that it will not let moral scruples get in the way of buying oil in Sudan.

As an aside: France seems to have been less focused on Francophone Africa in recent years with its energies taken up in other areas of the world – they have been quite happy to cooperate with the US in aiding American military training operations across the Sahel - where in the past this would have been a definite no-no - yet they don’t seem to have given up yet on Deby as ‘their man’ in Chad. The French military seems to have played some role supporting government action against the eastern Rebels but, according to AFP (via “Baku Today”! Don’t you just love the internet?), were not involved in the fighting directly.