In an article from Reuters on Friday, it is reported that the leaders of Chad and the Sudan signed a deal critical to solving the crisis in Saharan Africa. According to the Reuters story,
Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir and his Chadian counterpart Idriss Deby signed the non-aggression deal in Senegal late on Thursday in an effort to end cross-border rebel attacks on their respective territories.
But the Chadian National Alliance, part of a rebel coalition that attacked the capital N’Djamena last month, besieging Deby in his presidential palace for two days, dismissed the Dakar deal and vowed to pursue their campaign against him.
Foreign diplomats say Chadian rebels have regularly used the Darfur frontier region as a base from which to launch incursions into Chad. Sudan has in turn repeatedly accused Chad’s government of backing Darfuri rebel groups.
“The tribe which leads the rebellion in Darfur is the same tribe that is now governing Chad,” he told Reuters. Chadian President Deby is from the Zaghawa tribal clan that lives on both sides of the frontier.
As a practical matter, Chadian rebel forces are aligned with the government of the Sudan and the Darfur rebels are aligned with the leader of Chad. That leaves 400,000 refugees at risk of death, starvation or rape. This then is the tragedy of the human condition where individual leaders can bring chaos on the lives of so many because of their personal foibles . . .
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