Over 2,500 Irish troops did tours in Chad, where the authorities are now responsible for refugees and displaced persons
THE IRISHMAN who served as deputy force commander for the UN mission to Chad, which winds up this week, says he is hopeful that Chadian authorities will be able to ensure security in the country’s restive eastern flank.
The UN force, known as Minurcat, was tasked with facilitating humanitarian access and protecting hundreds of thousands of displaced Chadians and refugees who had fled Darfur in neighbouring Sudan.
It replaced the similarly mandated Eufor, a EU deployment that included Irish troops. More than 2,500 members of the Defence Forces completed tours in Chad under Eufor and Minurcat.
The final batch of Irish troops serving with Minurcat returned in May after Ireland moved to withdraw from the mission ahead of a UN Security Council decision to dissolve the 4,375-strong force at the request of the Chadian government. “The Chadian authorities stepped forward and said they wanted to assume their sovereign responsibility for the area in which the UN forces were operating. That’s a positive,” said Brig Gen Ger Aherne, appointed deputy force commander of Minurcat in March 2009.
“We showed the way forward. They asked for the baton, and we have given them the baton. While I was there, the Chadian authorities certainly, by our observation, had seen what the requirement was; the co-ordinating structures were in place; and they were working the system in their own way which was not so dissimilar to what we had done . . . We had no calls for alarm or concern.”
A Chadian-run police force, the Détachement Intégré de Sécurité (DIS), which the UN had been helping to train and support, will assume full responsibility for protecting refugees and the internally displaced in the central African country. But doubts have been raised over the capability of Chadian government forces to protect vulnerable civilians living in camps in eastern Chad.
“It is probably a work in progress,” Brig Gen Aherne said of the DIS. “They started from scratch and built up quite rapidly. They aren’t perfect and that is something they would recognise themselves.” He hailed as positive the establishment of a joint Chadian-Sudanese border monitoring force following a rapprochement between Khartoum and N’Djamena. But with a referendum on secession in south Sudan next month and elections in Chad later in the year, there are fears the region could again tip into violence.
“There are a number of new factors coming, and I can’t predict how they may affect the situation,” said Brig Gen Aherne. “One of the greatest challenges is the possibility of any security fallout from all those political events. We remain hopeful that there won’t.”
As Minurcat winds up, many in the region are assessing what the troop presence achieved.
Asked about its legacy, Brig Gen Aherne refers to a recent conversation with a senior World Food Programme official in Chad. “He said both Eufor and Minurcat provided stability to eastern Chad and gave reassurances to the humanitarian actors for their security. He also said he thought the international presence accelerated Chad-Sudan rapprochement and showed the way to the Chadian government as to how they would have to do things in the absence of the international community.”
The greatest challenges were organisational and logistical, Brig Gen Aherne said. “The area of operation for both Eufor and Minurcat was 1,000km long and 450km wide and it was a very difficult terrain. The biggest challenge for us was getting there and sustaining ourselves there. It is a landlocked country with an austere climate and it is a few thousand kilometres from the nearest port so it was very hard on people and equipment.”