Chad Rejects U.N. Plan To End Genocide

UNITED NATIONS — President Deby of Chad yesterday followed in the footsteps of his nemesis, President Bashir of Sudan, rejecting a proposal that U.N. military troops be deployed in his country to protect refugees from Darfur and help them return home.

Mr. Deby recently expressed concern that a foreign presence in Chad could strengthen Islamist forces there, an argument similar to one Mr. Bashir has used in the past to reject U.N. troop deployments in neighboring Sudan.

Another neighbor, Muammar Gadhafi of Libya, raised such a concern last week at a meeting with Mr. Deby that was part of an effort to make peace between Chad and Sudan. Colonel Gadhafi said Chad and Sudan were close to an accord, but he warned them against any Western presence in the region.

"Western countries and America are not busying themselves out of sympathy for the Sudanese people or for Africa, but for oil and for the return of colonialism to the African continent," Colonel Gadhafi said recently, according to Al-Jazeera.

Diplomats at the U.N. Security Council said they would not shelve their efforts to send a U.N. military force to Chad, which Secretary-General Ban has recommended.

Yesterday's rejection from Mr. Deby "will not prevent us from starting to work on a resolution" to create such a force, a French diplomat, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record, said.

France and Ghana are preparing a U.N. resolution to authorize the military force, and France also is "trying to convince" Mr. Deby to change his mind and accept it, the diplomat said. Yesterday's rejection was a setback but "not the end of the story," he added.

Mr. Ban has recommended that the Security Council create a U.N. force of up to 11,000 troops and helicopter gunships to be sent to Chad's side of the border with Sudan — where at least 225,000 refugees from Darfur are living in makeshift camps — as well as to the neighboring Central African Republic.

A representative of Mr. Deby's government relayed the president's apparent rejection of the proposal yesterday to the ambassadors of the main powers at the Security Council in the capital of Chad, N'Djamena.

"For Chad, it has never been a question of receiving any military force on the eastern border, but rather a civil force made up of gendarmes and police officers," Deputy Foreign Minister Djidda Moussa Outman told the ambassadors, according to Reuters.

The expanding regional war spilled into Chad and the Central African Republic from Darfur after government-backed militias known as janjaweed butchered hundreds of thousands of villagers in a campaign Washington says is genocide.

Refugees then crossed the border between Chad and Sudan, leading to clashes between militias on both sides. The two countries are fighting each other through "proxy groups," Georgette Gagnon of Human Rights Watch said.

Several recent press reports have highlighted Western intelligence agencies' concerns about the growing power of Al Qaeda operatives in North Africa, known as the Maghreb region. Last year, Mr. Bashir used such concerns to reject a proposed U.N. force of 20,000 troops to strengthen the existing 8,000-troop African Union force in Darfur.