Sudan Spillover

Last week I wrote about the potential humanitarian and political disaster inherent in darfurians spilling across the border into Chad. Today Smith College professor Eric Reeves, who has been one of the strongest, smartest voices on Sudan in recent years, has an op-ed in the Boston Globe in which he discusses other potential calamaties that might befall Chad as a result of its unfortunate luck of geography.

Idriss Deby, the president of the central African country of Chad, may soon lose power to a group of variously motivated rebel movements. The deposing of Deby might not seem occasion for much regret: he is a cruel, tyrannical, and corrupt man who has squandered a great deal of Chad's new-found oil wealth. But the rebels who would replace him have the deeply troubling support of the genocidal regime in Khartoum, Sudan. In recent months, as Human Rights Watch has authoritatively reported, the National Islamic Front in Khartoum has supported the Chadian rebels, even as it has loosed its own murderous Arab militia allies on the non-Arab tribal populations of eastern Chad. Indeed, Human Rights Watch reports that ''the Janjaweed militias have carried out attacks inside Chad accompanied by Sudanese army troops with helicopter gunship support."

While the long-term goal of removing Deby from office would be a good and decent one, this is not how it ought to happen and these are not the people to do it. The crisis in Sudan is beginning to have a multiplier effect that is going to result in further chaos. Chad and Darfur are becoming inextricable, and there is no reason to believe that it has to stop there. Cross-border destabilization in Africa tends to find fertile ground. This is yet another reason for ardent action from the outside world.