Is Chad the Next Darfur?

At The New Republic, Armin Rosen reports that if UN Peacekeepers pull out of Chad, there could be a new crisis similar to what happened in Darfur:

But there is another danger to peace and security in the region. The next setback will likely happen in neighboring Chad, where an estimated half-million genocide survivors have taken refuge in a volatile area near the Sudanese border, patrolled by a U.N. peacekeeping force called MINURCAT. The mission is considered vital to the refugees’ continued safety. In a February letter to the U.N. Security Council, Human Rights Watch’s Africa division head Georgette Gagnon wrote that “the peacekeepers appear to have prevented a resumption of large-scale violence and mass killings.”

So it's worrisome that—with MINURCAT's mandate set to expire on May 26—Chad's dictator, Idriss Deby, who calls the mission a "failure," seems poised to send more than one-third of the nearly 4,000 U.N. peacekeepers back to their home countries.

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