A New African Crisis

The NY Times reports that the fighting in the Darfur region of Sudan has spread to Chad. This growth in the conflict has been predicted for quite a while, but due to the lack of involvement by major countries such as the U.S. has not amounted to much. Currently the U.S. just supports the African Union (AU) forces, only a few thousand troops interjected in the conflict to enforce a ceasefire that has long since been followed. While there has been talk in the U.S. government and in the U.N., there has not been much substative effort to back up the AU forces in their enforcement, nor has their been much effort in expanding their mission into one preventing genocide. Now, the NY Times is reporting the predicted inevitibilities, the beginning of a Chad-Sudan war. Both sides claim that groups operating out of Darfur have been conducting violence. For instance,Human Rights Watch's recent report on the background of the Darfur conflagration note that:

The government of Chad has several times during the Darfur conflict accused Sudan of harboring and supporting the Chadian rebels and sponsoring attacks on its territory, but relations were mended.

The Sudanese govenment, according to a Human Rights Watch report implicate the Sudanese armed forces, as well as the government supported janjaweed in incursions into Chad to target refugees from Darfur:

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.

Between these two governments lie the people of the Darfur region and the areas of Chad to which many thousands have fled. When both governments have declared mutual war on the rebels, there is only one outcome likely: a killing field. While the U.S. has responded, in calling this as "a campaign of terror that the Bush administration has called genocide" according to the NY Times, not much has been done about it. If the U.S., NATO and the EU do not act, this will become a stain upon the Western countries' reputations in the shape of Rwanda.