A Western Voices exclusive interview
The United Nations Security Council has authorized France to send a massive troop response to prop up the collapsing government of President Idriss Deby of Chad. The Deby regime is dominated by his Zaghawa tribe, despite promises to add other ethnic groups to the ruling cadre. The opposition is a coalition of disenfranchised tribes who launched a blitzkrieg attack across the width of Chad ahead of a planned French led European “peace keeping” forced cobbled together to “respond” to the “humanitarian crisis in http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2536’s Colonel Gadaffi. The latest fighting is a last ditch effort by the tribal coalition which has reformed its fighting groups after aa defeat in 2006. Thousands have been displaced, and an unknown number killed. The French have already allowed the “government” to launch attacks on the rebels from French positions, and the war may spread.
Western Voices asked a Middle East expert, academic and leading member of European Americans United for a take on the crisis. We wanted to know if this is really an “Islamist insurgency” as is being claimed, or a tribal conflict.
Image: Sarkozy hopes France has more success against ethnic uprisings in Chad than it does at http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2763.The rebels are just tribal forces. The Darfur war is, after all, just a run-of-the-mill tribal war. The estimates of 200,000 dead or 400,000 dead (made on one day on TV by PBS News Hour and CBS News) are just propaganda numbers from the International Crisis Group, which has managed every step of the news coverage. Like the bizarre ICG claim that the Janjaweed (black nomadic Arab speaking slave raiders) are “like the Waffen SS.”
The rebels of Chad are tribal groups that span the border with Sudan. The current fighting is like other fighting that has seen the deteriorating central government facing increasingly strong tribal militias (in many cases, army units have defected to their tribal compatriots). The tribal groups started fighting in Darfur, but because there was a strong force to fight back they have increasingly turned their attacks into Chad, which is moving toward state collapse, or at least bankruptcy. There are other tribal rebellions across Chad but not reported on because they are in godforsaken regions that no one cares about (i.e., that have no resources or geostrategic value).
However, one thing Wolfowitz did at the World Bank was to manipulate conflicts in Africa by giving or withholding money. He gave grants to Ethiopia to bring them into the fighting in Somalia, and he withheld money from the central government of Chad, so as to reduce its strength vis-a-vis the tribal rebels. (The ostensible reason for withholding normal grants from Chad was that the government had broken into the fund for the future, created to manage oil profits, to arm police to suppress rebel forces.) This had two purposes: One, to keep the fighting going in Darfur, and two, to justify foreign intervention in Chad. Chad, of course, has a lot of oil, and if a Zionist controlled force could be placed across the oilfields in Chad, it might not be as good as having Zionist controlled forces astride the oilfields of Sudan (since Sudan is very close to Israel and has always been seen as a potential resource base and colony for the Jewish state), but it is something.
And behold, a Jewish president is prepared to send those Zionist controlled troops to Chad… the Neocon President of France, the Hungarian Jew Sarkozy. And as Kouchner (also Jewish) is trying to manufacture a human rights case to intervene in Chad (and how much weaker than the reasons for intervening in Israel-Palestine), the Chadians respond by http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=2235 childless salons of multicult France.
Gadaffi was involved in various confliccts in Chad, but has since made his peace with Europe. Still, he has recently pushed his “http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3248" vision again. Is Libya involved here?
No. Although anyone who did not take arms from Libya in the last 30 years in Chad is a chump, there is no Libyan role. Not Islamists–in fact in recent years many of the tribal groups traced down and help capture Salafist Group for Call & Combat (GPSC) teams in Chad—in return for guns.