After three days of fierce fighting between government troops and rebels here, most of the dead citizens had been carried off, mourned and buried by their families. But the dead rebels had been lying in the streets for days, abandoned by their fleeing compatriots, and attracting black clouds of flies. Even the soldiers held their noses.
But other remnants of the battle that nearly toppled Chad’s government last weekend will not be wiped away so easily. The clash has heightened tensions between Chad and Sudan, threatening to pull the two neighbors deeper into each other’s vexing problems.
Each country accuses the other of forming and causing rebellions across their shared border, and now that Sudanese rebels who had previously been focused on their own struggle in the western Sudanese province of Darfur have come to the aid of Mr. Déby, it has added fuel to the cross-border enmity.Such international alliances and rivalries increase the chances that the entire region could fall into an uncontrolled conflict like the one that engulfed the Great Lakes region of Central Africa after the Rwandan genocide of 1994.
More immediately, the long-sought international peacekeeping missions in both countries have struggled to deploy, because of the new violence here in Chad and the Sudanese government’s stalling tactics in Darfur. This has plunged the fates of more than 2.5 million refugees on both sides of the border into even greater uncertainty.
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