In proceedings described by witnesses, prosecutors and jurists as a “historic moment,” the Rome-based Permanent People’s Tribunal (PPT) launched a session this week exploring allegations of state crimes against Kachin and Rohingya communities in Burma. “The first objective is to give visibility,” said the PPT’s permanent secretary Dr. Gianni Tognoni, on the purpose of the opinion tribunal opening held in London from March 6-7 and webcast live. Representatives from the Burmese government were invited but did not attend the session—in an act of symbolism, an empty chair labeled “Myanmar Government” was placed in the room for the duration of the launch. Witnesses from the Kachin National Organization (KNO), the Center for Human Rights Research and Advocacy in Malaysia, the Burmese Rohingya Organization UK (BROUK) and professors from Queen Mary University and the School for Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) testified before a panel of three jurists—international experts on genocide and international law; the Dalai Lama also sent a statement in support of the proceedings. Through both live and videotaped testimony provided by activists and lawyers, Rohingya refugees and internally displaced Kachin described suffering a range of abuses, from sexual violence to military air strikes and shellings of their homes. Dr. Mandy Sadan, SOAS professor, historian and author, spoke on the historical context in which the current violence in Burma has unfolded. She was the first at the event to emphasize the significance of the Kachin and the Rohingya presenting testimony together—an observation echoed by members of the prosecution team and the jurists. “This is one of the first occasions in which one of the largest non-Burmese groups have chosen to ally themselves with the Rohingya,” Dr. Sadan said of the Kachin. “This is a vitally important aspect of this tribunal.” With regard to the joint participation with the Rohingya, the KNO’s Kai Htang Lashi said: “Their suffering is our suffering. We share the same perpetrator—the state, the military institution. One community is not more important than another community. We all suffer.” After a hearing a full day of testimony, the panel of jurists presented a joint statement declaring that the charges put forward “demand adjudication by the Permanent People’s Tribunal.” Dr. Helen Jarvis, who once served as a public affairs officer on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, described the abuses as fitting into three categories: “identity framing” through the exclusion of ethnic and religious minorities, allegations of war crimes and crimes against humanity against the Kachin, and allegations of war crimes and genocide against the Rohingya. Of particular concern, she explained, were demographic shifts linked to these patterns, noting that, according to testimony, 10 percent of the Kachin population was now internally displaced, and that the Rohingya population in Burma had been “halved” in less than 40 years. Member of the panel of jurists and former UN Assistant Secretary-General Denis Halliday urged for greater political leadership from Asean in encouraging the Burmese government to address allegations of human rights violations, and described what he sees as the impotence of the United Nations Security Council and the International Criminal Court in prosecuting crimes—like those described to the tribunal—under international law. Upcoming Sessions A full and broader session of the PPT concerning Burma will be convened within six months, likely in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to produce a “reasoned judgment.” The jurists and conveners of the tribunal have extended an open invitation to other groups in Burma who wish to bring their experiences before the panel in future sessions. PPT President Dr. Tognoni described the evidence presented in the opening session as “compelling,” but noted that it needs, “in order to be really evaluated and assessed, further documentation and systematization.” In the next session, jurist Denis Halliday recommended that the PPT look into issues of “complicity” by international investors, agencies and countries such as the UK, US, China, France, and Israel, for promoting “security and investment” instead of confronting allegations of abuses by the state. People’s tribunals—of which there have been 42 sessions convened globally since 1979—are not necessarily directed at “the powerful,” said Daniel Feierstein, a genocide scholar and jurist on the current tribunal. Those in power he explained, “not only know what happens, but they [may] be the indirect or direct perpetrators or accomplices in what is happening.” Therefore, opinion tribunals are “more of a call to the people, to take care of the suffering of others, even if they are suffering too. And I feel that’s what happened yesterday and today,” Feierstein said in his closing comments. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Irrawaddy

Relatives waited Thursday at a morgue in Guatemala City to learn the names of girls who died in the blaze at the children’s home. CreditJohan Ordonez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images This article was originally published on New York Times website on March 9,2017 GUATEMALA CITY — Guatemalan human rights officials said Thursday that they believe that the 35 girls who were killed when a fire swept through a dormitory at a children’s home had been unable to escape because they were locked inside. As new questions arose over the fire at the Virgen de la Asunción home, evidence emerged that the girls had been confined to a small room after they had escaped from the residence and been recaptured by the police. “There were 52 girls in that room, and if someone locked the doors, the consequences are serious,” said Hilda Morales, the adjunct prosecutor for human rights. The locked doors were still a “presumption” that had to be confirmed by Guatemala’s attorney general, Ms. Morales added. “The responsibility lies with the staff, the director and the secretary” for social welfare. Mayra Veliz, general secretary of the attorney general’s office, said a team of 16 prosecutors would handle the investigation. The Health Ministry said 23 girls remained hospitalized. Officials began to transfer other children and adolescents who lived in the home to other facilities. The children, some of them orphans, came from poor families and many have suffered abuse. But questions were also raised about the response of firefighters and the police. Speaking to a congressional panel on Thursday, police officials and fire officials blamed each other for a 40-minute delay in reaching the victims. Legislators also heard that only three of the 64 security cameras were working in the home, which housed some 750 children in space meant for 500. The fire early Wednesday has led to an outpouring of grief and anger as evidence of negligence at the home mounted. Officials have cited troubles at the home since 2013. Last October, a prosecutor recommended shutting down the home. Eric Rosenthal, the executive director of Disability Rights International in Washington, said that officials from the human rights prosecutor’s office believed that the girls had been locked in as punishment for the protest. It is still unclear how the fire started, he said. Mr. Rosenthal said he was particularly concerned about the fate of residents with disabilities. “There is a tendency to dump them in other places to get rid of them,” he said. Nic Wirtz reported from Guatemala City, and Elisabeth Malkin from Mexico City. (c) New York Times 2017

Amidst the ongoing genocidal destruction of Darfur, atrocity crimes of all sorts continue to be committed by the regular forces of the Khartoum regime (the Sudan Armed Forces) as well as its militia allies (now primarily the Rapid Support Forces). These crimes are committed with complete impunity. The genocidal character of violence in recent years is beyond reasonable dispute (see “Changing the Demography”: Violent Expropriation and Destruction of Farmlands in Darfur, November 2014 – November 2015” | http://wp.me/p45rOG-1P4). The non-Arab or African tribal populations of Darfur—the majority of people in the region—continue to be the intentional targets of army and militia killings, village destruction, land expropriation, and violent displacement. They are also the targets of a campaign of rape that has marked the genocide since the beginning of conflict in 2003. This report provides a statistical and analytic overview of the years 2014 and 2015. A mapping of all data for this period appears at | http://wp.me/p45rOG-1Qy The campaign of rape has been all too well documented (see Appendix B for a bibliography of reporting going back more than a decade | http://sudanreeves.org/2016/01/14/7098/). Racial epithets hurled at victims by their Arab attackers have been remarked in all of these reports, and continue to be documented by Radio Dabanga, along with 2015 reports from Sudan Development Organization (UK), our only meaningful sources for information about the continuing use of rape as a weapon of war. In contrast, the UN has repeatedly demonstrated a despicable acquiescence in reporting on a subject that Khartoum regards with particular concern, given the opprobrium that attaches to rape as a crime in the Arab Muslim world. Both dysfunctional UNAMID reporting from the ground and reporting by the UN Secretariat in New York suggest how great this acquiescence is. For example, in the first two quarterly reports by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in 2012, on Darfur and UNAMID, not a single incident of rape or sexual violence is noted, even as rapes continued on a scale that dwarfs all but one or two conflicts in the world today. Women who are targets of rape in a violent and deeply insecure Darfur Many tens of thousands of girls and women have been raped or sexually assaulted since early 2003, although we of course have nothing approaching a precise census (as is true for mortality related directly or indirectly to violence). For the UN Secretary-General to omit mention of even one example in reports that represented six months of 2012—the year in which current violence began to accelerate and plans for the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) rapidly advanced—is reprehensible. Certainly we know from many scores of reports from Radio Dabanga that UNAMID typically fails to report rapes brought to their attention, and certainly does no significant investigative work and offers pitifully little protection. A sense of the scale of the sexual violence in Darfur is most readily apparent in an April 2012 study released in PLoS Medicine and based on the work of a number of authors, most prominently Dr. Mohamed Ahmed Eisa, whose archives from the Nyala-based Amel Center for Treatment & Rehabilitation for Torture Victims were essential in generating that data the permitted publication in this peer-reviewed medical journal: Approximately one-half (49%) of all women disclosed that they had been sexually assaulted, and one-half of sexual assaults were described as having occurred in close proximity to a camp for internally displaced persons (“Medical Evidence of Human Rights Violations against Non-Arabic-Speaking Civilians in Darfur: A Cross-Sectional Study,” PLOS Medicine, April 3, 2012 | DOI:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001198) Any extrapolation, of even the most conservative nature, yields figures of many tens of thousands of women raped in Darfur, perhaps reaching to the hundreds of thousands. This pervasive climate of impunity culminated in the mass rape of girls and women in Tabit, North Darfur (October 30, 2014 – November 1, 2014). Some 220 girls and women were raped over the course of 36 hours by regular Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) soldiers, on orders from the commander of the SAF garrison near Tabit. Nine days later (November 10, 2014), UNAMID was finally allowed to “investigate,” but found a village terrified by the massive security presence as UNAMID investigators arrived. The whole scene was filmed by security officials, and two Military Intelligence officers escorted every investigator. There was no opportunity for any individual to speak openly, something readily apparent to the investigators. Nonetheless, UNAMID headquarters immediately released a statement declaring: None of those interviewed confirmed [in Tabit] that any incident of rape took place in Tabit on the day of that media report. The team neither found any evidence nor received any information regarding the media allegations during the period in question. An internal UNAMID document, however, leaked to me from within UNAMID on November 20, 2014, made clear how fully aware the investigators were of the impossible circumstances in which they had conducted their “interviews.” In February 2015 Human Rights Watch released a definitive report on the Tabit rapes: “Mass Rape in North Darfur: Sudanese Army Attacks against Civilians in Tabit.” Lead author Jonathan Loeb interviewed 130 people, including more than 50 current or previous residents of Tabit, victims as well as eyewitnesses. UNAMID inaction in the presence of an assault on civilians---a commonplace Rather than accept the Human Rights Watch report as authoritative, the UN and the international community continue to make self-serving demands for what they know to be an impossible “independent investigation,” now well over a year after events. Khartoum has made emphatically clear that it will permit no such investigation, making international demands for access pointedly irrelevant, if politically obligatory. Instead of responding to realities as reported by those on the ground, the world continues to dither, with no talk of consequences for massive atrocity crimes, established as fact beyond all reasonable doubt. The Rape of Girls in Darfur We should not be surprised that given this international acquiescence, rape continues unabated, even in the Tabit area. Radio Dabanga reported on October 31, 2014 that 49 rapes had occurred in and around Tabit since the events of October 31 – November 1, 2014. What has not received sufficiently specific attention is the frequency with which the victims of rape are girls, female civilians under the age of eighteen. And yet this is a huge population: a shocking 2005 UNICEF “Child Alert” for Darfur reported that one of every three rape victims was a girl: A recent report from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights said that in almost one in three reported rapes, the victims were children, and a recent UNICEF/UN Population Fund study suggests that the number might be even higher. The immediate impact of these rapes is life-threatening and horrific for the victims. They are also attacks on the very fabric of families and communities, extremely painful events that add to the endemic feelings of humiliation and powerlessness. If these rates do in fact define the use of rape as a weapon of war in Darfur, and given the findings of the PLOS Medicine study (see above) then we must speak of tens of thousands of girls having been raped during the conflict. The immediate occasion for this survey of rapes targeting girls, however, was a single incident reported by Radio Dabanga (December 10, 2015) in the following terms: Girl raped by four near Tabit, North Darfur | December 10, 2015, Tabit, North Darfur A 14-year-old girl was gang-raped in Tawila locality, North Darfur, today. Speaking to Radio Dabanga, a relative of the victim reported that four militiamen riding camels ambushed the girl as she collected straw in the area of Kedareik, five kilometres east of Tabit. “They raped her alternately for three hours, from 10 am until 1 pm,” she said. The victim was taken to a clinic in the Zamzam camp for the displaced near El Fasher, capital of North Darfur. “She is still bleeding. As a result of the shock he is not able to eat nor talk,” the relative added. Tens of thousands of such girls have been raped; they are a prime target of Arab militias Women with good reason to be fearful It is an open question as to whether the girl will survive. Radio Dabanga almost never follows up in cases such as this with reporting on the medical outcomes of treatment. This is a function of the difficulty of securing information from within hospitals, and the fact that other events continue to demand intensive reporting resources. Radio Dabanga did offer the world the first, and remarkably accurate, account of the rapes at Tabit only one day after these terrible events. Notably, however, reporting by Sudan Development Organization/UK (SUDO/UK) has this year become much stronger with its own very large contingent of Darfuri monitors on the ground and reporting to London (SUDO was one of three Sudanese national humanitarian organizations shut down by Khartoum at the same time (March 5, 2009) the regime was expelling thirteen major international humanitarian organizations). Beginning with the monthly surveys of Human Rights Abuses in Sudan in June of this year, previously scattered and somewhat irregular reports were consolidated and provide clear overviews, month by grim month. All data from these monthly reports, as well as the less organized previous reports of 2015, are reflected on the data spreadsheet. But the rape of girls has long seemed to me to demand particular attention, and requires an especially harsh judgment, given its cruelty, its destructiveness, and the unfathomable agony that typically extends to the victim’s family and village (or displaced persons camp). Often girls have only recently experienced genital circumcision, and are as a consequence much more vulnerable to medical complications following gang-rape. The fact of gang-rape in itself greatly increases the medical risks, and many girls have clearly succumbed to injury and trauma. A girl deliberately scarred so as to make the fact of her rape permanently visible (photograph by Mia Farrow) This brutally heinous crime has been reported authoritatively for more than a decade: A recent United Nations investigation into war crimes in Darfur laid out, in page after graphic page, evidence of widespread and systematic rape in the two-year conflict. In one incident, a woman in Wadi Tina was raped 14 times by different men in January 2003. In March 2004, 150 soldiers and janjaweed abducted and raped 16 girls in Kutum, the report said. In Kailek, it said girls as young as 10 were raped by militants. (New York Times [el-Geneina, West Darfur], February 11, 2005) Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF)/Holland reported in March 2005: "One of the three men [Janjaweed] took me away from the other women. He threatened me with his knife by pinching my chest with it. He pushed me on the ground and took off my underwear. He raped me and was repeating, ‘I will kill you’ all the times to intimidate me." (From a young girl, 14, February 2005, South Darfur) ("The Crushing Burden of Rape: Sexual Violence in Darfur," March 2005) And yet nothing meaningful has been done to halt this terrible crime; indeed, Khartoum promptly arrested two of the most senior MSF officials in Sudan following publication of "The Crushing Burden of Rape: Sexual Violence in Darfur,” a signal that was lost on no organization working in Darfur. More has been published, including a crucial report by Physicians for Human Rights (again, see Appendix B for a bibliography of studies that have attempted to address the subject of rape in Darfur), but the reality of girls as young as five and six being raped has not prompted particular outrage. Moreover, it is not simply paramilitary or militia forces that are responsible for the rapes of girls and women: regular soldiers continue to participate in the orgy of sexual violence, as demonstrated by the mass rapes at Tabit, committed by SAF troops on orders from their garrison commander. The utterly despicable crime of raping girls has to date occasioned no specific analysis—no aggregation of data or reports, no assessment of implications for the longer term welfare of these girls in Darfuri society. Such analysis will be limited in completeness and usefulness so long as Khartoum denies human rights reporters all meaningful access to Darfur, and allows no independent international news coverage or interview opportunities. The scale of rape, and specifically the rape of girls, remains with too many other horrors contained within the “black box” that the regime has succeeded in making of Darfur. A girl branded to mark the fact of her rape (photograph by Mia Farrow) But we cannot watch in silence as massive evidence continues to accumulate that many tens of thousands of girls have been raped or sexually assaulted over the past twelve years. We may at least survey what data are available and draw whatever conclusions these data permit. And certainly we should be fully aware of how international law bears on what is represented by the massive, ongoing campaign in which rape is deliberately used as a weapon of war in Khartoum’s genocidal counter-insurgency. [It must be said that the particular plight of children, not just those sexually assaulted, has received much too little attention over the years; Appendix A offers a lengthy general assessment I published in the Sudan Tribune in December 2005—ten years ago almost to the day. Far too little research has come in its wake—certainly nothing that obliges a qualification of the broader conclusions. Among the few subsequent studies, excerpted for this Appendix, there is clear evidence of terrifying psychosocial profiles for children in camps for the displaced, characterized by extremely high rates of clinical depression and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In August 2011 the distinguished British medical journal The Lancet published findings of a shocking magnitude: …forcibly displaced children in low-income and middle-income settings have high rates of psychiatric disorders. Thus 75% of 331 displaced children in camps for internally displaced people in southern Darfur met diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, and 38% had depression.] These figures are much likely worse four years later as Khartoum has dramatically accelerated attacks not only on villages but on camps for the displaced as well.] Continuing Genocide in Darfur The genocidal nature of the present, extremely intense counter-insurgency campaign—now in its third year and focusing ferociously on Eastern Jebel Marra and the Jebel Marra massif more generally—remains conspicuous if we look at those attacked and their attackers. In the Jebel Marra region broadly, the predominant African tribal group is the Fur, the largest ethnic group in Darfur. The farms violently expropriated—destroyed by military bombings and by the loosing of livestock onto lands rich in crops, and which in turn have been claimed by various Arab militia groups—are African farmlands. African villages are again being attacked on a wide-scale, with clearly ethnic targeting (photograph by Brian Steidle, 2005) So, too, the victims of rape in Darfur are overwhelmingly African—with Arab militiamen, regular SAF troops, or opportunistic bands of thugs almost always the perpetrators. And at least one clause from the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide has clear relevance for an understanding of the systematic rape of African girls and women in Darfur. Article 2 of the Convention reads in its entirety as follows: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. There can be little doubt that clause (b) bears directly on our understanding of the systematic, ethnically-targeted rape of girls and women as a weapon of war (a war with consequences that fall within the ambit of clause (d)). Indeed, it is difficult to determine in the case of girls which is likely to be more consequential: “bodily” or “mental” harm. Both are so extreme as to make comparison invidious. The seriousness of the “bodily” harm is captured all too well in the recent example above from the Tabit area. We will never know how many girls suffered fatal bodily trauma during gang-rapes; we will never know how many cases of fistula were caused by rapes, or other physical injuries that would compromise physical life or preclude conceiving or giving birth to a child. There is significant medical literature addressing the issues here, including one using data from Darfur; they are included in the bibliography. But we also know that suicide is the despairing response to rape in too many cases, both among girls and women. Physicians for Human Rights, in an unprecedented study ("Nowhere to Turn: Failure to Protect, Support and Assure Justice for Darfuri Women," May 2009 (http://physiciansforhumanrights.org/library/reports/nowhere-to-turn.html), found that Darfuri women living as refugees in eastern Chad had extremely poor mental health indicators, and these were much worse among women who had been raped: Women who experienced rape (confirmed or highly probable) were three times more likely to report suicidal thoughts than were women who did not report sexual violence. And we know from many reports just how deeply stigmatizing rape is—the primary reason Arab rapists often burn or scar their victims, thereby ensuring that the fact of rape can never be fully hidden (see photographs above). For girls and women of marriageable age, the consequences of this stigmatizing can be immensely destructive. Opportunities for marriage often disappear entirely; some men divorce their wives after they have been raped, a sign of how deeply consequential the fact of rape is in the conservative Muslim ethos of Darfur. Families are often traumatized by the rapes of girls, which they are often forced to witness. In late February 2004, at the height of genocidal destruction, notorious Janjaweed leader Musa Hilal was reported by several witnesses to have been in command during an episode of almost unfathomable destruction: In an attack on 27 February [2004] in the Tawilah [more commonly Tawila—ER] area of northern Darfur, 30 villages were burned to the ground, over 200 people killed and over 200 girls and women raped—some by up to 14 assailants and in front of their fathers who were later killed. A further 150 women and 200 children were abducted. (UN Integrated Regional Information Networks, March 22, 2004) Musa Hilal, the most notorious of the Janjaweed leaders, was present and directing the attack reported immediately above The Janjweed have been replaced by the much more heavily armed and directly supported (from Khartoum) Rapid Support Forces (RSF); they are engaged in the same kind of genocidal destruction. Addressing the RSF in December 2014, the Second Vice President of the Khartoum regime likened the African peoples of East Jebel Marra in North Darfur to "insects"...echoes of Rwanda The rape of girls and women is very frequently accompanied by the use of racial epithets, confirming the ethnic targeting of the victims as defined in the genocide convention. Notably, in the Akayesu judgment, a Trial Chamber of the Rwanda Tribunal explained that, “rape and sexual violence may constitute genocide on both a physical and mental level” (William Schabas, Genocide in International Law, 183). In Darfur, reports of rape clearly document the physical level (actus reus) of the crime while the frequently accompanied use of racial epithets confirm both the ethnic-targeting of victims and mental intent (mens rea) of the perpetrators. Racist animus in sexual assaults It is imperative to bear in mind that rape and sexual violence have a strong racial/ethnic animus in Darfur. Virtually all the reported attacks are of Arab men upon non-Arab or African girls and women (in its 2004 study, Amnesty International found only one instance in which rebel forces from the Fur, Massalit, Berti, Tunjur, or Zaghawa non-Arab or African ethnic groups were responsible for rape). Here the reports from SUDO/UK are of particular value, since they frequently identify in particular incidents the ethnicity of those killed or raped or maimed. This must not be lost sight of, as some have already done (see Dissent Magazine, January 26, 2012). The examples here from Amnesty International (“Sudan, Darfur: Rape as a Weapon of War,” July 19, 2004) could be replicated from countless other reports and news accounts: [1] “Omar al Bashir told us that we should kill all the Nubas. There is no place here for the Negroes any more.” (Words of a Janjawid fighter, according to a refugee from Kenyu, interviewed by Amnesty International in Chad, May 2004) [2] “The Tama, a small ethnic group mainly composed of farmers, have been both victims of attacks and accused several times of siding with the Janjawid in the 2003-2004 conflict: ‘Slaves! Nubas! Do you have a god? You, ugly black pretend… We are your god! Your god is Omer al-Bashir.’” [3] “M., a 50-year-old woman from Fur Baranga reported: ‘The village was attacked during the night in October 2003, when the Arabs came by cars and on horses. They said’ “every black woman must be killed, even the children.”’” [4] “Sudanese refugees interviewed by Amnesty International in Chad, who alleged that Salamat nomads from Chad and fighters from Mauritania were recruited to fight in Darfur: ‘What we heard from the Janjawid is that Omer al-Bashir tells the foreigners that they are Arabs and that they should come and live in a country that is ruled by Arabs. That they should not stay where they are ruled by Africans. They say that ‘Sudan is a country for Arabs.‘” (M., Sudanese refugee in Chad, interviewed by Amnesty International in May 2004) [5] “‘The government gave the Arabs confidence, arms, cars and horses. We cannot go back; there will be no security for African people in Darfur.’” (Sudanese woman interviewed by Amnesty International in Mile refugee camp, Chad, May 2004) [6] “M., a Masalit chief of the village of Disa, reported that during attacks in June 2003 by the Janjawid and in July and August by the military, 63 persons were killed, including his daughter. In June the Janjawid reportedly accused the villagers of being ‘traitors to Omer Hassan Al-Bashir.’ [ ] In July the military arrested several persons including Brahim Siddiq, a seven-year-old boy. In June the Janjawid said during the attack: ‘You are complicit with the opponents, you are Blacks, no Black can stay here, and no Black can stay in Sudan.’ Arab women were accompanying the attackers singing songs in praise of the government and encouraging the attackers. The women said: ‘The blood of the Blacks runs like water, we take their goods and we chase them from our area and our cattle will be in their land. The power of al-Bashir belongs to the Arabs and we will kill you until the end, you Blacks, we have killed your God.’ They also insulted the women from the village saying ‘You are gorillas, you are Black, and you are badly dressed.’” The MSF report from 2005 (“The Crushing Burden of Rape: Sexual Violence in Darfur” | Amsterdam, March 8, 2005) provides other terrible examples, including: “We saw five Arab men who came to us and asked where our husbands were. Then they told us that we should have sex with them. We said no. So they beat and raped us. After they abused us, they told us that now we would have Arab babies; and if they would find any Fur [one of the non-Arab or African tribal groups of Darfur], they would rape them again to change the colour of their children.’ (Three women, 25, 30 and 40, October 2004, West Darfur)” Sexual assaults against boys, including rapes, have been reported during the long course of Darfur’s genocide. But the most common form of violence is for boys of any age simply to be murdered, and not only by means of indiscriminate firing by militia forces or bombing by SAF aircraft. This determination to kill boys was captured graphically in a report by Julie Flint in February 2005: Maryam Ahmad had travelled with her 21-day-old son, Ahmad, on another road controlled by Janjawid, between Tawila and Kabkabiya. The Janjawid had stopped her, taken Ahmad from her and cut off his penis. He died in her arms. “It’s what they do to boys,” said Afaf, two months pregnant and preparing to return to al-Fasher to deliver. (Middle East International [Darfur], February 17, 2005) And rape is “what they do” to girls. The world well knows this, and yet refuses to respond to this terrible reality in any meaningful way. Impunity The response of authorities in Darfur has been consistently unhelpful in halting the epidemic of sexual violence, clearly following guidelines that have their ultimate origins in Khartoum. However these may be interpreted locally, the effect is to maintain the present climate of complete impunity in the rapes of girls and women. Two reports from SUDO/UK are all too characteristic. On November 26, 2015 SUDO/UK reported: Janjaweed militiamen lashed four women in their farms near Gereida (South Darfur). The militiamen were dressed in military uniform with their faces masked by Al-Kamadol. The camps Sheikhs reported the incident to the police and to the Commissioner; however, the case was rejected by both stating that the victims simply should not have gone to their farms in the first place. In short, regime-controlled authorities in South Darfur are sanctioning the type of violence cataloged extensively in the data spreadsheet. This has become the prevailing view not only of authorities, but of the Arab militiamen, whether from Darfur or other countries, who regard the land of African farmers as theirs, and that any violence used to keep these farmers and their families from cultivating or using the lands is justified. A second SUDO/UK report concerning the rape of a girl (October 20, 2015) is even more disturbing in its deep injustice: Six Janjaweed militia members attacked four women in Sori, west of Khazan Gadeed in the Tabit area, killing one and raping another. A survivor told monitors that at 14:00 six men wearing military uniform with their faces masked with Al-Kamadol and riding on the back of camels attacked their farms. At this point the women were told that they were going to be raped for the remainder of the day and the men began firing into the air, causing the women to disperse and run in different directions. The perpetrators managed to capture two of them, one of whom was a 25 year-old Fur who was shot in the chest as a result of her resistance, whilst a 17 year-old Fur was caught and brutally raped. The two other women then fled back to their village to call for help and returned to the scene with support, by the time which the perpetrators had fled. The 17 year-old girl was taken to the hospital and the Sudanese army was informed of the incident in Tawila. However, not only did they fail to act, but they also filed a case against the three surviving women under laws pertaining to Zina (illicit sex). Holding those responsible for reporting a brutal crime to be guilty themselves of “illicit sex” is incomprehensively unjust, and yet quite unsurprising. Although occasionally rapists are reported to have been arrested, I know of no report of those guilty of sexual assault in Darfur remaining incarcerated for their crime(s) (some are briefly held and then released). This climate of impunity ensures that girls and women will continue to be raped in great numbers, and that the patterns of the past thirteen years continue. Moreover, nothing does more to explain the grim repetition of patterns of rape in South Kordofan and Blue Nile than the silence and acquiescence on the issue by the international community, which has failed repeatedly to make of sexual violence a major issue in dealings with the Khartoum regime. DATA ON THE RAPE OF GIRLS Despite international indifference, it is possible to quantify and map data on rape in Darfur, at least in part, using Radio Dabanga (RD) and SUDO/UK (SUDO) and their extraordinary range of sources on the ground as the basis for such an effort. A data spreadsheet, highlighting all reported rapes of girls over the past two years, may be found here. Also included in the spreadsheet, though not highlighted, are rapes of women ages 18 – 25—women of prime marriageable age, and for whom rape is of greatest significance in defining chances for marriage, or preserving a marriage and family. The spreadsheet also includes reports of the abductions of girls and women, unlikely to be for ransom (as would be the case with the abduction of boys and men). Thus, for example, many dispatches report sexual assaults and abductions that may or may not receive further clarification. For example, on December 27, 2015 Radio Dabanga reported: On Friday [December 25, 2015], a group of militiamen abducted seven women from the Hamidiya camp for the displaced in Zalingei, capital of Central [formerly West] Darfur. The women were collecting firewood north of the camp early in the morning, when they were attacked, the coordinator of the Central Darfur camps told Radio Dabanga. He said that the incident was reported to the police and UNAMID, “but so far they did not move to rescue the women.” These women—perhaps including girls—may be raped or kept as sexual slaves, possibly held for ransom (though unlikely), or may conceivably escape. It is extremely unlikely that UNAMID will move to rescue them.' We have no figures for the number of girls and women who have died from rape or their resistance to sexual assault. We do know that the condition of many reported rape victims, and the lack of access to medical care, ensures that there have been a very large number of fatalities resulting from sexual assault. Many more have been severely, often permenently injured. Often women are beaten by Arab militiamen simply because they are non-Arab women. For example, Radio Dabanga reports (October 21, 2014): “Militiamen attacked more than 22 women who were working their farmlands. They beat the women with their whips and rifles butts. At least 22 women were injured, some of them seriously." There was, however, no accompanying account of rape. The quantification of the spreadsheet data on the three regional maps of Darfur makes conservative assumptions about how to interpret individual events with respect to the issue of rape; nonetheless, there is still a considerable degree of ambiguity, even as the two primary sources—Radio Dabanga and SUDO/UK—sometimes report different figures for the same incident. More problematic yet is SUDO/UK’s aggregation of data on rape for Darfur, South Kordofan, and Darfur, making those data unusable for present purposes. The vast majority of rapes involve girls or women ages 18 – 26 (only 26 incidents of rape over the past two years do not fall in one of these two age categories, and they appear at the end of the data spreadsheet). Only incidents that include the rape of girl(s) are highlighted in yellow on the spreadsheet; if not highlighted, the reported incident(s) exclusively concerns sexual assault(s) on women 18 – 25—prime years of marriageability and child-bearing. Large or unquantifiable accounts of data are highlighted in blue, and while most are highly significant in their own right, only a couple of these figure in the mapping of incidents on the three regional maps of Darfur, since the risk of redundancy in reporting and tabulating is too high. For example, Radio Dabanga reports that from mid-July to mid-August 2014: 45 women, including 12 minors, have been raped in the period between July 1st and mid-August… the government-backed militiamen are often not satisfied with raping alone. “They humiliate the victims even more, by shaving their heads, and mutilate their bodies.” “The 12 minors, who were raped, suffer from genital problems. Only four of them have been treated, for fistula, at El Fasher Teaching Hospital.” But this represents an aggregation of data from earlier reports by Radio Dabanga; there is no indication that these incidents have previously gone unreported. The spreadsheet has six columns: date of report or dispatch; date of event(s); location; age(s) of those assaulted; ethnicity of those attacked, if reported; number rape victims, as well as those abducted or physically assaulted; source. There are approximately 350 individual entries for the two-year survey (2014 and 2015), some representing a great many victims, such as the 220 girls and women raped at Tabit, North Darfur (October 31 – November 1, 2014). Where the ethnicity of the victims is reported (by SUDO/UK) it is included with this other information. Most commonly reported as victims are girls and women who are Fur, Berti, Zaghawa, or Tunjur. For example: October 28, 2015 | SUDO/UK (November Report) A Janjaweed militia attacked Abu Zaid and Hawar Tator areas, which lies 20km to the west of Tabit. During the incident six women were raped, including one 13 year-old girl. The militia arrived to the areas at 11:00 on the back of 47 camels and 24 horses from Jebel Tarni wearing military uniform though hiding their faces with Al-Kamadol. Upon finding the women present at their farms members of the militia informed the women that they had been told previously to not return to their farms otherwise face the consequences. They then began to open fire over the heads of the women and chased after them managing to catch six, who were then brutally raped multiple times by different aggressors. Following the mass rape the victims were beaten and left injured on the ground as the militia left. The six women were aged 14, 29, 31, 46, 49, and 53 and include three Fur, one Zaghawa, and two Tunjur. Again, all data from the spreadsheet are mapped onto three regional maps covering all of Darfur; all may be found here. (These data do not include the seven girls and women reported as raped in 2016). There are clear similarities in geographic patterns mapped in “‘Changing the Demography’: Violent Expropriation and Destruction of Farmlands in Darfur, November 2014 – November 2015” | Waiting for protection... ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 SUDAN Research, Analysis, and Advocacy

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Darfur Women Action Group

South Africa issued a notice to formally revoke its withdrawal from the International Criminal Court on Tuesday. The decision comes after the Gauteng High Court ruled in February that the initial process to withdraw from the ICC was unconstitutional and invalid. On Tuesday, the secretary general of the United Nations Antonio Guterres issued a statement saying that South Africa had revoked its withdrawal from the ICC as a result of the high court ruling. Guterres referred to the ruling, saying “the approval of the Parliament of South Africa had to be obtained before the Instrument of Withdrawal from the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court can be deposited with the United Nations”. The high court, however, heard that Parliament had not been consulted about the decision to withdraw from the ICC. Last year, South Africa announced it would withdraw from the ICC after it was condemned by the international court for not arresting Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir during his visit to the country in 2015. Al-Bashir has been accused of war crimes and genocide, but has denied the allegations. The ICC issued a warrant for al-Bashir’s arrest in March 2009, and then issued a second warrant in July 2010. The charges against al-Bashir include five counts of crimes against humanity, two counts of war crimes and three counts of genocide. The Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) found that South Africa had been inconsistent with its own law by not arresting al-Bashir. The state approached the SCA after the high court ruled it was obligated to arrest al-Bashir. But the then deputy minister of justice and constitutional development, John Jeffery, defended the decision to not arrest al-Bashir, saying it would “basically be declaring war” with Sudan. “The ICC is not the court we signed up for. It has diverted from its mandate and allowed itself to be influenced by a powerful non-member…” Jeffery said. South Africa formally began the process to withdraw from the ICC in October 2016, telling the UN that its obligations to peaceful conflict resolution were “incompatible” with the UN’s. Justice Minister Michael Masutha will appear before Parliament’s international relations committee on Wednesday to address the high court ruling which found the withdrawal from the ICC to be unconstitutional. Retired judges, meanwhile, have made a submission to Parliament’s justice and correctional services portfolio committee regarding the state’s decision to withdraw from the ICC. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Mail and Guardian

Afghan police arrive at the site of an explosion in Kabul. The attack rattled Kabul's diplomatic district, as insurgents struck Afghanistan's largest military hospital. (Shah Marai/AFP/Getty Images) KABUL — Gunmen disguised as doctors and medics drove an ambulance into Kabul’s main military hospital Wednesday morning, then opened fire on patients and staff members and battled Afghan security forces for hours. At least 30 people, most of them civilians, were killed and twice as many wounded, officials said. The audacious midmorning ­attack, the deadliest in the Afghan capital in months, was claimed by the Islamic State extremist militia. It drew immediate condemnation from foreign governments and humanitarian groups, and was denounced as an “atrocity” by the U.N. mission here because it targeted a medical facility. “This attack marks an abhorrent new low. Dressing in disguise to shoot at the sick and wounded is a cowardly, wicked act,” Hamdullah Mohib, the Afghan ambassador in Washington, said in a statement. “These are forces of evil the world must work together to defeat.” It also highlighted the threat of terrorist violence that continues to plague even the most secure areas of the Afghan capital, as well as other regions, after 16 years of conflict with Taliban insurgents and other armed groups that has cost tens of thousands of lives and involved more than 100,000 American troops at its peak. Currently 8,400 U.S. troops are in the country, and U.S. military officials have said more are needed to prevent further insurgent gains and to keep the Western-backed government afloat. As the Trump administration weighs its policy options here, experts have warned that 2017 is likely to be as grueling and deadly as 2016, which had a record number of civilian casualties and left Taliban forces in control of more than one-third of the country. The increasing threat from the Islamic State, known here as Daesh, is especially worrisome. “We are on the front lines of a fight that can affect the world, and we can’t let Afghanistan become a global terrorist center,” Siddiq Siddiqi, the chief spokesman for Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry, said this week. “We have made a lot of sacrifices, but we need more help, especially in counter-terrorism.” The assault Wednesday began when a vehicle bomb detonated outside the front gates of the Sardar Daud Khan medical complex, a large and heavily guarded compound that is near the U.S. and European embassies, the headquarters of the U.S.-led military coalition, and Afghan government buildings in central Kabul. Almost immediately afterward, witnesses and officials said, gunmen already inside the hospital, wearing white medical coats, pulled out concealed assault rifles and began shooting. At least four attackers were involved, some of whom took cover on the second floor. Grenade explosions were also heard inside the compound. “Suddenly gunfire broke out and a gunman was shooting at everyone, he was shooting at doctors, patients and visitors,” a witness identified as Zahir Khan told news agencies. He said he had hidden under a table in the hospital and later escaped. Some patients and staff members were seen climbing out hospital windows and crouching on ledges. The attackers fought off Afghan guards, police and special forces for hours before all of the assailants were finally killed, officials said. Sporadic gunfire was heard well into the afternoon. Military helicopters were seen landing on the hospital roof, and commandos scrambled out to join the fight. “I saw a man in a white shirt with a gun in his hand, firing,” a military doctor who gave her name as Zainab said in a brief online conversation Wednesday night. She said she and her colleagues took refuge in the hospital basement for four hours before the siege ended. “Everybody was so frightened,” she said. “I don’t want to go back there.” A security official said late Wednesday that the gunmen sneaked inside by using an ambulance to pretend to bring patients for treatment. The hospital treats sick and wounded Afghan military personnel and their families. Officials said that doctors and patients were among the casualties and that more than 66 wounded victims were taken to two civilian hospitals. The incident followed a pair of similar attacks March 1 on a police station and an intelligence police facility in the Afghan capital, which left 23 people dead. Those attacks were claimed by the Taliban, which denied any role in the new assault. The Islamic State asserted responsibility through its online Amaq News Agency. Regional ­militias pledging allegiance to the Islamic State, based near the ­border with Pakistan, have said they were responsible for numerous bombings in Kabul in the past year, including one that killed 80 people during a peaceful ­protest, another that killed 22 people outside the Supreme Court, and several at Shiite mosques. The capital was clogged and chaotic Wednesday morning, and many streets were already closed because of a large ceremony marking the third anniversary of the death of Marshal Mohammed Fahim, a former Afghan army chief and anti-Soviet militia leader. Many government officials and Afghan leaders attended the all-day ceremony across the city, accompanied by large numbers of government and private armed guards, leaving the area near the military hospital quiet and deserted just before the blast. President Ashraf Ghani, who was speaking at a ceremony honoring International Women’s Day when he learned of the assault, condemned it as “an attack against the entire people of Afghanistan. A hospital is considered immune in any law, any religion and sect,” he said. The attack came just days after Ghani replaced Kabul’s longtime police chief for not curbing terrorist actions as well as rising criminal activity in the capital. The government’s chief executive, Abdullah Abdullah, addressing the ceremony for Fahim, called the attack a “crime against humanity,” adding: “The only solution is to keep unity. Our enemies are only able to carry out their goals when there is political discord.” Disputes between Abdullah and Ghani have left the government divided and weakened. A statement from the U.N. assistance mission called the attack “egregious and morally reprehensible” and said it may “amount to a war crime” because it targeted people “at their most vulnerable” and those caring for them. “Without question, it amounts to an atrocity, and the perpetrators must be held accountable,” the statement said. (C) 2017 The Washington Post

Since 2015, the conflict between Chad’s armed forces and Boko Haram has destabilised the Lake Chad region in the west of the country. Defeating this resilient insurgency requires the state to go beyond a purely military campaign and relaunch trade, improve public services and reintegrate demobilised militants. Executive Summary Since early 2015, attacks in Chad by the Nigerian jihadist group Boko Haram have killed hundreds, displaced more than 100,000 and damaged the regional economy of the Lake Chad basin. Violence peaked in 2015 with suicide bombings in the capital and in the Lake region, and has since declined. Chad’s military engagements and its role in the fight against terrorism – around Lake Chad and elsewhere in the region – have brought significant diplomatic gains, most recently the appointment of Foreign Minister Moussa Faki as chairperson of the African Union Commission. But the security risk hasn’t disappeared. To counter the ongoing threat while responding to the immediate and longer-term needs of the population, Chadian authorities need to build on the relatively successful regional security cooperation, start to move away from their highly militarised response to include a more significant civilian component, elaborate a more coherent economic development plan and deal more effectively with former Boko Haram members. Boko Haram’s presence in Chad has been most strongly felt around Lake Chad, which lies primarily within Chadian territory. The area combines rich agriculture, pastoralism and fishing and is a magnet for migrants from all over the Sahel, leading to tensions over control of resources. Boko Haram has taken advantage of the geography of the lake seeking refuge on its many islands. The cultural and religious influence of Nigeria’s Borno state facilitated the penetration of the Borno-born jihadist group, which has also taken advantage of longstanding communal tensions in the area. Initially, Boko Haram’s presence on the Chadian side of the lake was limited. But violence rapidly escalated in 2015, partly in reaction to the intervention by Chadian forces in neighbouring states. Two suicide bombings in the capital N’Djamena and multiple attacks on villages and army posts followed. Attacks diminished at the start of 2016, having never reached the levels seen in Nigeria, Cameroon and Niger. This was accompanied by a wave of surrenders of Boko Haram members in the second half of the year, but which seemingly included few if any of the hard core. Attacks continued, however, throughout 2016, as the jihadist group showed repeated resilience and adaptability. The violence Boko Haram unleashed has led to over 100,000 displaced and 7,000 refugees on Chadian territory by the beginning of 2017. In 2015, this heightened longstanding antagonisms between communities and made community-level conflict management more challenging. Some community chiefs have been caught in the violent crossfire. Some have been pressured by the national authorities, while others have been accused of complicity or targeted by Boko Haram and one has even been killed. Stigmatisation of some of the Buduma ethnic group, suspected of colluding with Boko Haram, was acute but has lessened since violence decreased. The reaction of the Chadian authorities has been primarily military, both in the Lake region and through interventions in neighbouring countries. A state of emergency was imposed in November 2015 and has been renewed several times since, and administration has been partly militarised. Many suspected Boko Haram members captured on Chadian soil have been imprisoned for long periods without trial. Local defence militias have been created and have played a significant role against the jihadist group. But the heavy security response has come at a cost, especially in restrictions of movement imposed on a traditionally highly mobile population heavily dependent on cross-border trade. As the first phase of a new military offensive by armies in the region has just been launched (Operation Rawan Kada), the risks of infiltration and a rise in attacks on the Chadian territory are real. A large-scale attack could act as a trigger and, as in 2015, lead to stigmatisation, particularly of the Buduma population. Until now, national authorities have failed to articulate any longer-term plan for the area, and there is little sense of how the impact of Boko Haram is dealt with at a civilian level. A clear new development strategy is needed, which should be driven by the needs of the population in the Lake Chad area and not tied too closely to the fight against the jihadist group. The reduction of the Boko Haram threat largely depends on actions taken in neighbouring countries, primarily Nigeria. However, measures can be taken to contain it in Chad and in particular in the lake area: Chadian authorities are ill-prepared to deal with suspected Boko Haram members who have surrendered or been captured. A screening process must be initiated to distinguish between real members and those who were either at the periphery or even not associated to the group at all. The latter should be released and integrated in broad community development projects targeting the youth. Following the recent initiative of the interior ministry in neighbouring Niger, Chadian authorities should elaborate a framework document for the treatment of surrendees and communicate it to its international partners. To encourage surrenders, counter violent radical messages, improve communication by the authorities and allow local people to express their concerns, community radio stations should be supported and expanded. Most of these will necessarily operate at local level, but consideration should be given to developing community radio stations with a remit to cover the whole lake area, to reflect the diversity and integration of the populations. Such radio stations, which could be based on existing initiatives in neighbouring countries, should broadcast in a wide and balanced range of local and national languages, and should include messages of peace, calls for surrender directed at Boko Haram members and information on other issues of lakewide interest such as cattle prices. To balance the heavily militarised response to the Boko Haram threat in the lake area and to avoid its militarisation, and to address the needs of the population suffering from violence and displacement, including through better and more sustainable development strategies: Far more civilian capacity must be gradually brought in. This should include a stronger involvement of local authorities in strategic decision-making and a better administrative presence to rebuild social services and ensure civilian needs are taken into account. To encourage civil servants to work in the region, a system of temporary bonuses could be considered. Measures should also include support for community-level initiatives concerning social cohesion. Chadian authorities should propose clear political options for the future of the lake. They should elaborate a medium- and longer-term plan for the development of the Lake region, together with the development donors and in consultation with the local population. It should be sensitive to the needs of a highly mobile population. The risk of concentrating financial resources on the lake to the detriment of other regions should not be neglected. Chad is a very poor country with many areas in a precarious situation. It is therefore necessary to rebalance the portfolio of projects so as not to neglect the pressing needs of other regions. The welcome efforts of donors to set up projects in the region must take account of risks of injecting large amounts of development funding so to avoid reinforcing some conflict drivers. As a first step, development agencies should finance a socio-anthropological study into the livelihoods and mobility of the population, and consider how to involve local communities in development programs. Chadian authorities should review their current policies, which restrict economic activities on the lake, and take measures to support, protect and relaunch the regional economy. A protected trade corridor between Chad and Nigeria would facilitate trade and improve the living conditions of the population. Nairobi/Brussels, 8 March 2017 I.Introduction In the aftermath of the April 2016 presidential election, which saw Idriss Déby win a fifth term, Chad became central to the struggle against terrorism in Africa. With the election on 31 January 2017 of the country’s foreign minister, Moussa Faki, as head of the African Union Commission, the Chadian regime is reaping the benefits of an active military diplomacy which has seen it intervene in many foreign countries and notably, since early 2015, against the jihadist group Boko Haram. Even so, it still faces massive challenges: a major economic and financial crisis resulting from both the slump in oil prices and the disruption of trade with Nigeria and Cameroon; the absence of any change in power and the risk of a future succession crisis; and resurgent security threats beyond Chad’s borders – the prevailing anarchy in southern Libya recently led the Chadian authorities to close their northern frontier, while conditions are worsening in the Central African Republic (CAR) and problems persist in Darfur. Moreover, following the interventions of its army against Boko Haram in neighbouring countries, Chad has found itself exposed to attacks by the jihadist group on its own soil, causing many civilian deaths both in N’Djamena and on the islands and shore of Lake Chad, as well as large-scale displacements. Although the number of attacks in Chad dropped sharply in 2016, the threat posed by Boko Haram is continually evolving and will most probably persist over the long term. The growth of the terrorist group drew on deep structural problems in Nigeria. To solve them will take time, and regions that neighbour Borno state will long remain vulnerable. This Crisis Group report makes no attempt to analyse Boko Haram’s structure, leadership or resources. Instead, it seeks to understand the factors that facilitated the extension of the jihadist group’s activities into Chad – particularly through an analysis of the historical, cultural and economic features of the Lake Chad area – and how the group’s activity and the state’s response to it have affected the communities living there. Finally, it makes recommendations to replace a predominantly military response with a stabilisation strategy. Based on research carried out during visits to the Lake Chad region and N’Djamena in 2015 and 2016, this report is one of a series of Crisis Group publications on the jihadist threat in the Sahel and the Lake Chad basin. II.Lake Chad: Fertile Ground for Boko Haram Except for two spectacular bombings in N’Djamena in 2015, Boko Haram’s attacks and recruitment in Chad have mainly targeted the Lake region. The jihadist group has exploited the history, the physical and human geography and the economic dynamism of this distinctive lake environment, finding – like others before – both a refuge from the pressure exerted by the region’s national armies and a financial windfall. Boko Haram has also been able to draw on support, albeit often sporadic, among local communities that are sometimes competing with each other and have a history of resisting external attempts to impose a political authority. The geographical, linguistic, religious and cultural proximity of Nigeria’s Borno state – which each year attracts large numbers of Chadian immigrants – has facilitated its recruitment and the extension of the conflict to the Chadian shores of the lake. However, subsequent chapters will show how the military response by states in the region and, above all, the absence of a broad-based social constituency for Boko Haram in Chad, limited this expansion. A.A Complex History of Human Settlement Lake Chad, whose shrinking, allegedly caused by global warning, is already under scrutiny, now faces a new threat, having become the arena for a conflict between the bordering states and Boko Haram – with the local population caught in the middle. The history of human settlement in this area helps to explain how the jihadist group established itself. Once subjected to military conquests, the Lake region has found itself accommodating economic and environmental migrants, and armed insurrections have sometimes developed there. Historically, the Lake Chad basin, in its broad multi-country sense, has endured numerous invasions, motivated by a mix of religious ambitions, desire to impose political authority and to forcibly take control of the local economy. In this situation, the islands in the lake were places to both live and take refuge for populations insubordinate to political authorities, such as the Kouri and the Buduma (also known as Yédina), who account for the majority of island residents.Although they were willing to accept the arrival of new population groups, they persistently resisted the external influence of the Kanem, Kanem-Bornou and Baguirmi pre-colonial empires. During the colonial era, these populations often refused to merge their villages to facilitate tax collection. Even today, this desire for autonomy persists. Islanders fall under the authority of neither the “Alifa” of Mao – whose purview ends at the shores of the lake – nor the emir of Maiduguri, capital of the Nigerian federal state of Borno; their sense of belonging to a nation state is weak.Having long resisted forcible conversion, the Buduma only adopted Islam at the beginning of the twentieth century, eight centuries after the Kanem Empire had built its own political project around this religion. They are regarded by neighbouring communities as having an inauthentic practice of Islam, but sometimes accused of complicity with Boko Haram and stigmatised for that reason. The lake’s recent history is characterised by population mixing. In the twentieth century, its resources attracted new settlers – which fuelled economic growth but also sparked competition for control of the islands and the areas subject to seasonal flooding, a tendency that has been exacerbated by the current conflict. From Hausa migration to the Nigerian shores of the lake in the early twentieth century to the arrival of fishermen from southern Chad or West Africa some decades later, many communities were drawn to the lake, transforming it into an ethnic and cultural mosaic. Starting with the great drought of the 1970s and the process of contraction into the “small lake”, the region found itself hosting new economic refugees. These included farmers and Chadian, Arab, Fulani and Kreda and even Nigerien Toubous livestock herders, who altered their transhumance routes in search of grazing. With the water level sinking, new islands have appeared and seasonal fishing camps have become villages, inhabited by local people but also government officials and soldiers. Over the past 40 years, due to this “race to the lake”, the net migration rate has been strongly positive in the region. The small lake, which had 700,000 inhabitants in 1976, is today home to about 2.2 million – 13 million with the surrounding countryside – set to reach three million in 2025. Successive armed opposition groups have chosen to base themselves in Chad’s Lake region, even though the area is barely politicised and has little history of dissent. In 1978, the “third army” (or “Forces armées occidentales”) – a strand of the National Liberation Front of Chad (Front de libération nationale du Tchad, FROLINAT) – and later the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Chad (Mouvement populaire pour la libération du Tchad, MPLT) established itself in the area, supported by rear bases on the Nigerian shore. Some of their senior figures, native to the area, recruited numerous fighters from lakeside communities and from the Kanem region. After Déby took power in 1990, supporters of the former president, Hissène Habré, grouped in the Movement for the Defence of Democracy (Mouvement pour la défense de la démocratie, MDD), also tried to establish a foothold in the marshy areas of the lake, beyond the Grande Barrière. Finally defeated by the Chadian army in the mid-1990s, some of its fighters were absorbed into the Chadian army, while others fled to Nigeria. Today the leaders of the successive rebellions that developed around the lake are no longer a threat to the regime. B.Trafficking and Violent Raiding In part basing itself on the smuggling networks that operate across the lake, Boko Haram has repeatedly raided local communities and traders. This is just the latest episode in the region’s long history of such attacks – which have not only made their perpetrators rich but also boosted their social status. And even today, such kudos, which earns its holders the chance to choose a wife, is certainly one of the factors that encourage people to join Boko Haram or ally themselves with it. A number of sources report that, during their rest breaks, fighters often talk about marriage. Until the end of the nineteenth century, some local communities took refuge on the lake’s islands to escape raiding by sultanates and empires in the region, particularly those seeking to capture slaves. Arms traders also led military expeditions into the area, sometimes combined with religious proselytisation. The last few decades have seen smaller scale attacks staged by islanders, concealed in the reedbeds, mainly seeking to steal livestock or fishing boats. Such activities have been facilitated by the way some island communities have organised themselves around local warlords, called kella, who are able to agree on a carve-up of areas to target in raids. At the end of the colonial era, the dynamism of the economy and the limited local presence of the state, encouraged trafficking in fuel, medicines, drugs, weapons, identity documents and people. Customs officials were sometimes complicit, thus fostering the emergence of alternative illicit sources of authority. The lake’s topography, its distinctive vegetation and the difficulty of navigating its labyrinth of islands also helped smuggling to flourish. Moreover, the past 30 years have seen a intense growth in the activity of highway robbers (zarginas) – a reflection of the fact that pastoralists have become poorer, due to the drought, while successive Chadian civil wars have flooded the region with weapons. Many former Chadian rebels or soldiers – sometimes both simultaneously – became highway bandits before making their skills available to Boko Haram. Among them is Mustapha Chad, presumed to be a former Chadian soldier, whom some sources believe led the Boko Haram attack on Gwoza in Borno state in August 2014. Some Chadian prisoners suspected of being members of the sect say that they had also served in the Chad National Army (ANT). Boko Haram has managed to associate with or even incorporate some trafficking or bandit groups in order to get supplies or sell off what it seizes. C.Economic Attractiveness but Political Neglect Boko Haram’s success in establishing itself on the lake and its recruitment of youths with few prospects despite the area’s economic dynamism cast a harsh light on the shortcomings of the region’s states in dealing with their peripheral areas. The economic attractiveness of the lake and its resources have created a trading hub, contrasting with the inadequacy and unreliability of the lakeshore national governments’ public policies. In Nigeria, the development policies of the 1970s and 1980s, such as major irrigation schemes like the old Baga Polder Project, created many jobs, particularly for Chadian migrants, yet had only limited success. In Niger, and even more in Cameroon, the lake was regarded as a remote border area until the 1990s. In Niger, despite the construction of a road linking Diffa and N’Guigmi in 1975, it was not until the end of the 1990s that the state reestablished a serious presence in the Komadougou area – a result both of its proximity to Agadem oil fields and the accession to power of Mamadou Tandja, Niger’s president from 1999 to 2010, who has a stronghold near Diffa.Today, although Diffa is much better equipped and richer than many other towns in Niger, the Nigerien villages near the lake remain marginalised. In Cameroon, the Far North region became a focus of attention only recently, particularly because of the growth in highway banditry. The Lake Chad area is not, in geographical terms, a remote border area for N’Djamena, as is the case in neighbouring countries – and more than half of the lake’s surface area lies within Chad’s territorial frontiers. Often known as “N’Djamena’s garden”, the lake and its polders (agricultural fringes) supply the city with fish and agricultural products. The headquarters of the Lake Chad Basin Commission (LCBC), which has official responsibility for managing the lake’s resources, are in N’Djamena. And yet, the lake has some characteristics of a peripheral area, far from the centres of power. It was not until October 2015, after the attacks on Baga Sola, on the lakeshore, that Chad’s president visited the lake for the first time in his life. Having not been greatly affected by the civil wars, being little politicised and having produced few members of the Chadian elites, Lake Chad has largely stayed off the radar of successive regimes. While the Rally for Democracy and Progress (Rassemblement pour la démocratie et le progrès, RDP) of former President Lol Mahamat Choua still wins the votes of many Kanembu in Mao and on the shores of the lake, it is not regarded as a political threat by the central government and it allied itself with President Déby’s party, the Patriotic Salvation Movement (Mouvement patriotique du Salut, MPS), in the last presidential election. Moreover, two of the six members of the National Assembly from the Lake region are affiliated to the RDP and the other four to the MPS. Local elites from the lake area do not have much representation in N’Djamena. The extent to which the Chadian state has shown interest in the lake has fluctuated considerably. In the 1960s, it made a serious commitment, creating the Lake Chad Development Company (Société de développement du lac Tchad, Sodelac) and building polders. But the 1970s civil wars, combined with the impact of structural adjustment programs, substantially reduced available project funding and just a few donors continued to fund the Sodelac, notably its work on irrigation. In the 1980s, with the help of the UN, Hissène Habré launched an integrated project to develop road infrastructure and a seed farm, but these initiatives once again came to nothing due to security problems. The growth in oil revenues from 2007 onwards brought about change. While the state poured resources into infrastructure development in N’Djamena, Abéché and other major cities, some places around the lake also benefitted, albeit to a modest degree. Thus, to accompany an unfulfilled devolution scheme, infrastructure projects (such as a secondary school and a hospital) were launched in Ngouri, which had been made the centre of local administration, Bol and Guitté. Despite the area’s economic dynamism, access to public services is poor, and far below the national average. The gross school enrolment rate in the Chadian lake area is below 30 per cent and “community teachers” – in other words, the parents of pupils – generally have to stand in, in place of trained teachers. There is only one doctor for every 140,000 inhabitants, which is only a quarter of the national average. As a border area politically divided between four distinct states, the lake has not become an integrated whole for the purpose of providing the inhabitants with services – and this partly explains why local people pay little heed to their national capitals. Island populations’ distant, even mistrustful, relationship to the states, and very low rates of literacy, have certainly helped Boko Haram to recruit and indoctrinate in the lake area. In these regions deprived of public services, the group has managed to appear attractive. According to a recent study carried out in Nigeria, many young people, including women, felt that the group offers “unique opportunities” in providing access to Islamic education and a degree of social power. D.The Lake in the Orbit of Nigeria’s Borno State: Emigration, Trade and Influence The porous nature of borders in a region that has long been in Nigeria’s orbit facilitated the extension of the Boko Haram threat to the Chadian shores of the lake. In cultural terms, the lake forms part of what used to be the Kanem-Bornou Empire and the political organisation, language and customs of the Kanembu in Chad are very similar to those of the Nigerian Kanuri. The Chadian lakeshores and islands’ economy is heavily oriented toward Maiduguri – the epicentre of Boko Haram in Nigeria; the city serves as both a commercial hub and a religious and cultural centre for many Chadian migrants. 1.Economic emigration and trade relations For many years, inhabitants on the Chadian shore of the lake have looked more to Maiduguri than to N’Djamena. Islanders use the Naira, Nigeria’s currency. Many Buduma, Kouri and Kanembu have a limited sense of national identity – and only express it on rare occasions. They are used to moving across the border freely, in response to climate hazards or economic opportunities and they often possess identity documents from several lakeshore states. For many young Chadians in the region, the journey to Nigeria is crucial to build up savings and a marriage dowry. Numerous Chadian Buduma have worked as cattle herders on the Nigerian side of the lake, earning money to buy their own animals before returning home to get married. Climatic and economic migration reached peak levels during the great droughts of the 1970s. In search of grazing land, many Chadian pastoralists crossed the lake’s northern basin to reach the Nigeria-Niger borderlands. In this same period, some Buduma fishermen settled for several months of the year in Baga Kawa on the Nigerian shore to fish and sell their catches, adapting to fluctuations in water levels. And many Kanembu from the Chadian shore sought work in the ports or landing points – baga in Kanembu or Kanuri – in Nigeria: Baga Kawa, Malam-Fatori and Woulgo. The clashes between Boko Haram and the region’s armies have caused serious damage to these ports, which were revenue collection points for the jihadist group and demonstrations of its territorial control. In January 2015, its attack on Baga Kawa – one of the main Borno lakeside markets that it had previously controlled – left 2,000 dead and forced many Chadians and Nigerians to flee across the lake. More generally, the Islamist group’s attacks on the Nigerian shore, and the sometimes violent counter-insurgency strikes by the region’s armies, have led to massive population displacement, thus helping the conflict spread across the lake and on to the Chadian shore. 2.Borno state, a “boarding school” for many Chadians Religious education has also been a factor behind the migration of many young Chadians to Borno state. For many years, Chadian children and young men have gone to study in Maiduguri, the cultural and religious centre of the region. This trend has been particularly marked among the communities that live on the shores or islands of Lake Chad. From the 1960s onwards, Quran schools attracted more pupils – even for classes in the open air, sometimes sitting on the ground – than public schools, which were few in number and tended to be headed by Christians from the country’s south. Young Kanembu learnt the Quran from a mallum– a teacher or spiritual guide – in the island towns of Nguéléa, near Baga Sola, Liwa in the north east of the lake, in many small villages or even further afield, in Mao. Many of these youths subsequently set off for Maiduguri or Monguno – also in Borno – to continue the next stage of their studies in changaï, higher Quran schools. They thus spent several years in Nigeria on a journey that often resembled a rite of passage: “You have to study far from home and then come back later”, said a Baga Sola resident. These paths often combined religious learning with survival economics, particularly begging. In Baga Sola and Bol, recollections of childhood departure to Quran schools in Borno are legion: “When I was younger, a Chadian religious teacher collected us; we were 40 Chadian children, and we went to spend three years studying in Maiduguri. We had to beg people for money and food. Then my teacher wanted to come home so we came back”. The population explosion that got underway in the 1970s in the Lake region and the absence of government policies to deal with the impact of this demographic growth fuelled the pace of departures to Nigeria. While the vast majority of children who left to study in Borno returned to Chad without incident, some were exposed to the preaching of ulema close to Boko Haram, either within or outside Quran schools. Others had to flee or were repatriated when the Nigerian army intervened. In 2009 and 2012, hundreds of Chadian children fled to Ngouboua in Chad, having been expelled from Quran schools in Borno state, or because their villages had been “burnt down by Nigerian soldiers”. III.Evolution of the Boko Haram Threat in Chad For many years, Boko Haram’s activity was mainly concentrated in Nigeria’s Borno state, its historic stronghold. But since early 2014, the threat has become regional, and attacks on civilians and military positions have multiplied in northern Cameroon since March 2014 and in southern Niger and western Chad since early 2015. The arrival of Boko Haram in Chad is often dated back to 12 February 2015, the day of the terrorist group’s first attack on Ngouboua, on the shore of Lake Chad. But this statement should be nuanced. Chad had not been specifically targeted until the country decided to join the war in January 2015, in alliance with its neighbours (see the following chapter). This casus belli brought an end to the tacit non-aggression pact between Boko Haram and Chad and was very quickly followed by Shekau’s declarations of war: “Kings of Africa, I challenge you to attack me now; I am ready”. However, Boko Haram’s strategy of establishing itself on Lake Chad was not new. Since 2013, its fighters had been moving around the lake using Baga Kawa as a support base, helped by outboard motorboat operators familiar with the lake waters. A.Early Signs of Boko Haram’s Presence in Chad Before 2010, the growth of Boko Haram in Maiduguri did not affect N’Dja­me­na or the other big cities in northern and eastern Chad, characterised by very different cultures and the predominant use of Arabic. Thus, right up to today, neither the “classic” Chadian armed opposition nor the fundamentalist or purist Islamic associations – whose relations with the state are far from easy – have sought to politicise the phenomenon or take advantage of it. Yet, from the early 2000’s onwards, Kanuri and Bornouan living in N’Djamena were listening to the sermons of Boko Haram’s founder, Mohamed Yusuf, on audio cassettes. Some even posted stickers of his image on their cars. And his Chadian disciples regularly preached in the capital. Yusuf was violently critical of the Nigerian state, sometimes even calling for armed struggle. But in N’Djamena, his listeners were also seeking a linguistic echo: “It did us good to hear the word of God in our own language”, said a Kanuri religious leader. Religion has communal and linguistic hooks that help get a hearing in wider society. Boko Haram’s change of course, embarking on armed struggle – which helped to bring about Yusuf’s death in 2009 and continued afterwards – had a fundamental impact on the attitude of its followers in Chad. Many Bornouans in N’Djamena threw away their cassettes, fearing arrest. “When you mention Yusuf’s name today people are afraid”, a Kanuri academic recently admitted, adding: “And as for Shekau [who became the leader of Boko Haram] no one has ever listened to him; he’s a bloodthirsty brute”. After Boko Haram’s attacks on N’Djamena in June and July 2015, there was a surge in the searches and arrests targeting Kanuri, Hausa and Bornouans, which created a deep sense of exclusion. Some individuals are still in jail, while others have been released only recently. Witness accounts, sometimes second hand, mention religious proselytising, telephone ringtones that quote radical sermons and the sale of videos on Chadian island markets even before 2014-2015. Moreover, Boko Haram has long had Chadian members. For several years, some Chadians have been monitored by neighbouring countries’ intelligence services and, since 2011, some have been jailed, particularly in Maroua prison. More recently, in June 2016, many Chadian fighters reportedly took part in the offensive against Bosso in Niger. B.From an Active Conflict in Chad to a more Diffuse Threat Accustomed to rebellions fuelled by ethno-regional factors, Chad has had to confront a new kind of security threat since 2015. The first jihadist attacks on its soil took place just days after the Chadian army launched its intervention against Boko Haram in neighbouring countries (see the following Section). Throughout 2015, the group staged repeated raids on lakeshore villages; it carried out suicide attacks in N’Djamena in June and July 2015 and in Baga Sola in October 2015, killing several hundred civilians over the course of that year. Many islanders were abducted, as in Litri and Kaoudjiram in September 2015. Around 100 soldiers were killed in ambushes and in fighting against Boko Haram in the Lake region. But 2016 saw a major improvement in the security situation on the Chadian shore of the lake. The country suffered less than its neighbours from Boko Haram’s activities, which is explained both by the military’s strategy of containment and by the relatively recent and weaker nature of the jihadist group’s influence on local society in Chad. It has never controlled any territory in the country, nor established a real social base, and it has not carried out any spectacular attacks there since those in Guitté and Mittériné in early 2016. The deployment of both substantial military assets from the Chadian contingent of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNJTF) near the frontiers in the lake area, and the Chadian National Army (ANT) on the lakeshore significantly curbed the expansion of the conflict. However, the closure of the border, combined with the implementation of the state of emergency, has restricted trade – and this has had a major impact on the population (see Section V.A., below). Moreover, the group frequently infiltrates Chad and local people continue to pay the price. Despite recent improvements, the threat posed by Boko Haram is not fully under control. While attacks in Chad mainly affected the southern basin of the lake in 2015 and early 2016, since mid-2016 they have been concentrated in an area encompassing Kaiga Kindjiria, Bohoma and Tchoukoutalia in the northern basin, targeting both civilians and the military. From July until September 2016, they even increased slightly, mainly as a result of the MNJTF Operation Gama Aiki. Feeling the heat of the offensives mounted by the region’s armies in Nigeria and Niger, groups of individuals fled to Chad. Suspected members of Boko Haram arrested in the town of Liwa in September 2016 said they had fled from Nigerian army bombardments on the other side of the frontier. Operation Rawan Kada (dance of the crocodile) has just been launched as a follow up to Operation Gama Aiki, so one can expect more Boko Haram fighters infiltrating into Chad and therefore an upsurge in incidents in the coming weeks. In 2016, there was also a sharp increase in livestock thefts around the lakeshore, particularly between Liwa and Daboua. Several thousand heads of cattle were stolen in the past six months, some of which may have been sold off on markets in Nigeria and Niger, where prices are higher. This represents considerable economic capital. To combat this trafficking, the authorities in Daboua have reportedly asked Chadian traders to monitor and control the arrival of herds from Chad on Niger’s border markets. Although Boko Haram was soon blamed for these thefts, some are probably the result of normal criminality or activities that blend the two. The possibility of head-on conventional clashes between the Chadian army and Boko Haram – like those experienced by Niger and Nigeria – is limited at present. Even so, the risk of suicide attacks on the lake and even in N’Djamena is still taken seriously by the authorities. Rumours of planned attacks during national day festivities and the swearing in of President Déby, on 8 August 2016, caused widespread fear and security arrangements were strengthened. While a number of Boko Haram sleeper cells in the capital have been dismantled, it remains possible that members of the sect, or sympathisers, have “gone underground”. In the aftermath of the major offensive carried out by Nigerian forces in late 2016 in the Sambisa forest – one of Boko Haram’s traditional bastions – and with the governments of the region launching a new joint military operation around Lake Chad, the jihadist group is in retreat. Yet it has hitherto demonstrated an ability to adjust to the changing nature of state response, alternating asymmetric combat, suicide attacks and larger scale assaults – like the June 2016 offensive against Bosso, in Niger. The much greater coherence of the response by governments in the region has certainly taken its toll on Boko Haram, but experience shows that the group – like other jihadist movements – is highly adaptable. With a network that extends across a vast area, it would not be destroyed by an ultimate military battle. At the very least, Boko Haram still has the ability to sustain a guerrilla campaign and carry out one-off attacks. But the reverses the movement suffered in 2015 and 2016 have thrown light on latent internal divisions. Two main factions have developed, one led by Abubakar Shekau and the other backing Mohamed Yusuf’s own son, Abu Musab al-Barnawi – who seems to enjoy a privileged relationship with the Islamic State (ISIS). These two factions are tussling for the allegiance and control of the key hubs in the jihadist network, a rivalry that can turn violent. Al-Barnawi appears to have imposed his influence in the area of the lake where the three frontiers converge as well as on the Chadian shore, even though some groups continue to operate autonomously there. He has allegedly received some resources from ISIS and he is trying to overhaul the way Boko Haram functions. For the past few months, he has been toning down and curbing the use of violence against civilians; recently, he has concentrated his attacks – which are on a smaller scale than in the past – on military targets, attacking security force convoys in an attempt to capture equipment and weapons. C.Surrender and Return to the Chadian Shore Since 2016, the states of the Lake Chad region have reconquered some areas that Boko Haram had had a hold on and the number of its members who surrender has increased. In Chad, some elements of the group had already given themselves up to the authorities between January and March 2016, but since the end of July 2016, this trend has gathered pace, with the surrender of more than 1,000 people, of whom a majority are women and children. At present, around 300 men are still thought to be in the internment camps near Baga Sola, while the women and children, who formed the majority of the inmates, have been sent back to their home communities without incident and under the supervision of district administrators. To facilitate their social reintegration, the governor of the Lake region has called on all communities to welcome these women – several of whom have said their husbands are still on the front line.The people concerned are mainly Chadians who crossed the borders from Niger and Nigeria to turn themselves in at the advance command posts of the Chadian MNJTF force on the lake, including Kaiga Ngouboua and Kaiga Kindjiria, and at Madai in Nigeria; the majority is thought to have returned to Bol district. “What matters here is to recuperate the broad mass of people who periodically give a hand to Boko Haram or who have been sucked into the vortex in spite of their better instincts”, said a military expert. Several sources believe the explanation for these movements of people lies in the success of the region’s armies in “retaking control of some islands” – which sparked a retreat by Boko Haram and enabled these populations to take flight and hand themselves in. Others suggest that this military pressure affected the flow of supplies to the group and pushed it to release civilians and helpers who had become too much of a burden. Whatever the real reason, one should remain extremely cautious about these explanations and the reasons why people have returned and surrendered. Unicef, the Lake Region Office for Social Programs (Délégation régionale de l’action sociale au lac) and NGOs have registered some of those who have arrived, carried out awareness campaigns and transferred some children to a centre for transit and guidance in Bol. However, the next Section shows that so far, Chadian authorities have struggled to develop a real strategy to deal with these new arrivals, and particularly the men. IV.The Government’s Response across the Lake The presence of armed Islamist groups like Boko Haram is relatively new to Chad, although for a time the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (Groupe salafiste pour la prédication et le combat, GSPC) had its eye on the north of the country. In the report Chad: Between Ambition and Fragility, Crisis Group described both the state response to this unprecedented threat – reinforced security measures, updated intelligence techniques, new legal arsenal and tighter controls over religious activity – and the risks associated with this counter-terrorism policy. In this Section, Crisis Group seeks to analyse Chad’s rather tardy military engagement in the struggle against Boko Haram and its limits, as well as the use of community security techniques to deal with this new type of threat. A.An Initial Neutral Stance In 2010, Chad expressed concern about the expansion of Boko Haram activities on its territory.However, until early 2015, the country held back in military terms; it was more worried about other threats and the consequences of the chaos in Libya. Although they formed part of the LCBC regional force in 2012 as the conflict developed in Nigeria, Chadian troops, few in number on the lake, were not actually involved. Absent from the military arena, Déby was asked by Nigeria’s President Goodluck Jonathan to make use of his good offices to organise a meeting between senior Nigerian officials and representatives of Boko Haram in N’Djamena, in October 2014. Everyone expected that it would lead to the release of the Chibok girls – the Nigerian authorities even announced it prematurely. In the end, Chinese hostages were released in northern Cameroon, but it is not clear whether this was as a result of the Chadian mediation. The talks were made public by the media, causing the de facto breakdown of this channel of communication. Shekau declared that those who had negotiated in Boko Haram’s name were not its legitimate representatives. Déby felt bitter about this and subsequently told the press: “I had advised President Goodluck against opening negotiations with a terrorist group”. The failure of the negotiations and Chad’s initial wait-and-see stance toward Boko Haram engendered mistrust among senior Nigerian officers and politicians, with some accusing the country of indulgence. The construction, in central N’Djamena, of the house of the former governor of Borno state, Ali Modu Sheriff, and his relationships with the former Chadian transport minister and various dignitaries, which were not well regarded by neighbouring countries, fuelled this mistrust. Sheriff became an embarrassment for the government and was finally expelled from Chad in 2015. B.A Gradual Involvement as Neighbours Ask for the Support of the Chadian Military Machine In January 2015, a week after Cameroon’s President Paul Biya appealed for “international solidarity”, a large number of Chadian troops entered Cameroon, while others went to Niger, signalling a major shift in Chad’s stance toward Boko Haram. These interventions, which heavily altered the balance of military strength in neighbouring countries, probably dispelled Nigerian doubts. Several factors lay behind this change in Chadian attitudes. On the security front, Boko Haram’s October 2014 seizure of Baga Kawa, a Nigerian border settlement, served as an electric shock, warning that danger was near. But above all, the group’s activities were seriously disrupting economic relations with Nigeria and Cameroon, and fuelling Chad’s underlying fear that its routes to the sea could be cut, hurting its ability to export and, above all, to import food and manufactures. Its intervention against Boko Haram also helped N’Djamena consolidate alliances with Western powers and secure additional international funding. In a situation of serious economic crisis, Chad once again played the military diplomacy card. In late January 2015, Chadian soldiers based in Fotokol, Maltam and Mora in Cameroon’s Far North staged a first offensive on Nigerian territory, in Gambaru. While neighbouring states were doing no more than hold Boko Haram at bay at their borders, Chad was the only one to have a right of hot pursuit into Nigeria. A few days later, other Chadian troops set off for Bosso, in Niger, where they confronted Boko Haram before moving into Nigerian territory, this time alongside the Nigerien forces, for a “clean-up operation” in the north of Borno state. The Nigerian army’s inability to control the “liberated” areas, particularly the towns of Damasak and Malam Fatori, and the lack of joint military operations and intelligence cooperation frustrated Chadian authorities, who were highly critical of their neighbour and of President Goodluck Jonathan. The May 2015 election of Muhammadu Buhari as president of Nigeria changed the political context and, by extension, the degree of military cooperation between the two countries. According to Chadian diplomats, the two presidents get on much better and it has become much easier to share intelligence. Since pulling out of Niger and Cameroon in November 2015, Chadians have offered their services to neighbouring countries on several occasions. After Boko Haram’s attack on Bosso on 3 June 2016, the Nigerien president, Mahamadou Issoufou, asked for Chad’s help. Déby agreed to send soldiers to Niger and Operation Gama Aiki was launched in mid-June. Just as they had done a year earlier, the first Chadian troops arrived in Bosso and together with Nigerien forces, mounted joint offensives along the banks of the River Komadougou. Although they have sometimes been criticised by local people, some military personnel and parliamentarians in neighbouring countries, Chad’s interventions against Boko Haram have reinforced its standing as the region’s gendarme. In 2015, the MNJTF headquarters was transferred to N’Djamena, which is also the command centre for France’s Operation Barkhane, thus reinforcing the role of Chad as a strategic military hub. The common threat and the share of resources has facilitated a diplomatic rapprochement with the governments of neighbouring countries. While Niamey was already regarded as an ally, Biya had been dismayed by Chad’s dabbling in the CAR and relations between Goodluck Jonathan and Déby had been notoriously difficult. The reaction to Boko Haram has changed the mood and improved regional perceptions of Chad and its president. More broadly, Chad’s military interventionism was paralleled by important diplomatic advances. The late January 2017 election of Moussa Faki as head of the African Union Commission is only the most recent illustration of a steady progress toward regional domination which has seen Chad obtain strategic posts in numerous regional and international structures over the past few years. C.New Threat, Old Strategy: Community Security Arrangements For many years, Idriss Déby has relied on traditional authorities to guard against unrest in areas where military presence is weak. As it happens, the armed forces have had a strong presence in the Lake region since 2015, but the lake environment and the nature of the terrorist threat – hitherto unknown in Chad – undermine the deployment’s effectiveness. Aware of these realities, the government, and the president have called on traditional chiefs and local people to take steps to strengthen security. N’Djamena has pursued a twin track approach toward the traditional authorities in the lake area, combining pressure and incentives, and calling for “vigilance” and cooperation with the state. During the president’s visit to Baga Sola in October 2015, national and local authorities pressed for the establishment of a vigilante group in each village. This strategy has made it possible to collect intelligence and avoid attacks, but it does present some risks. 1.Traditional chiefs caught between a rock and a hard place In 2015, traditional authorities were sandwiched between repeated threats from the Boko Haram leadership and pressure from the Chadian government administration and security forces; these pressures have since markedly eased off. In February 2015, for instance, the chief of Ngouboua district was targeted and killed when Boko Haram attacked the town. Others, such as the chief of Bol district, have received a number of telephone death threats from callers accusing them of “collaboration with the authorities”. Relationships between lake-area traditional authorities and N’Djamena have often been tinged with mutual suspicion. After the attacks of early 2015, the former were accused of incompetence or complicity in failing to control their communities. Military authorities and the former governor of the Lake region put pressure on the chief of Bol district, who had reportedly housed a pregnant young woman suspected of having belonged to Boko Haram. Recently, he was even removed from his post, only to be reintegrated into society shortly afterwards. To avoid being viewed by the army as suspects, some lake area traditional chiefs and religious leaders told the local government administration they were ready to swear on the Quran that they had no links with Boko Haram. Finally, in some places in a region that has become highly militarised, traditional chiefs who have customary responsibility for oversight of the fishing activity and land rights surrendered this role to the military. The latter adopt a distinctly parsimonious approach to the allocation of useful economic rights on the lake. The appointment of colonels from the president’s ethnic group, the Zaghawa, as sub-prefects for Ngouboua and Tchoukoutalia could further complicate the cohabitation with traditional authorities. In 2016, relations between traditional chiefs and the state administration noticeably improved. In November 2015, at the president’s behest, a forum was organised, bringing together traditional community leaders, political and religious authorities, with the aim of clarifying the role that each should play. Traditional chiefs have become de facto state informers – a role that is often far from comfortable but which they say they are willing to take on. At the same time, the arrival at the end of 2015 of a new governor (Liwa), a native of the region who does not belong to the military, has reestablished a degree of confidence. Subsequently, district chiefs have even been closely involved in the process of bringing women and children who have surrendered back to their communities. 2.The creation of vigilante groups The authorities have also encouraged the establishment of vigilante groups. In many villages in the area, these groups carry out searches at the entrance to markets, mosques and points of aid distribution, and inform the authorities about the presence of suspect individuals. Women carry out searches of other women. These volunteers, often armed only with whips, machetes and knives, have on several occasions managed to identify suspected members of Boko Haram planning attacks, like in January 2016 in Koulkilmé or late 2016 in Kaiga Kindjiria. They also allegedly arrested and disarmed su spected members of the group in the villages of Tchoukoudoum and Koroum in December 2015. In contrast to their Nigerian counterparts, they do not carry out joint patrols with the security forces or receive vehicles; they are not paid much and they play little role in collective discussions and decision-making at community level. But the members of these groups gain social capital, through ceremonies when suspects are arrested and in reports by the Chadian media. The levels of remuneration they receive – which vary from place to place – are funded through collections from local residents and traders on market days and by the local authorities. Awareness of the role they play in the piecing together of intelligence has led to demands for better treatment; some have thus gone “on strike”, as in Bol in 2016, to secure more pay. This community-based approach to security and vigilance is very widely accepted by the population of the lake Chad area, but it does present long-term risks – notably that inter-communal tensions could fuel the emergence of local militias, as happened in the past in Nigeria and Niger, or the development of criminal activity, as in the Far North of Cameroon on several occasions. On the Chadian shore of the lake, the military authorities have reported a few instances in 2015 where members of the committees accused some people falsely, to settle personal scores. D.The Strategic Weaknesses of the Chadian Intervention The smaller number of victims on the Chadian side of the lake could suggest that the strategy of containment is working. However, these operations also led to numerous abuses and evident weaknesses – which in 2015 caused substantial army losses and, against the context of serious economic problems, represent a considerable financial cost. Recently, the failure to pay bonuses to soldiers posted to the area reportedly led a few to defect. And although counter-insurgency campaigns by the region’s national armies – including Chadian operations in neighbouring countries – have weakened Boko Haram, they have sometimes been marred by extra-judicial killings and collateral damage. That has certainly pushed some civilians into joining the group to seek revenge or to protect themselves. Moreover, the initial strategy – emptying the lake islands in order to track the fighters – has gone as far as it can, because it not only affects the economy but also undermines the structure of local societies by threatening their livelihood, which is based on activities related to the lake. Similar “clear-out” operations have also been carried out in the other countries fringing the lake, such as near the Komadougou river in Niger. And this brings risks: in 2015 and 2016, confusion was caused by the numerous arrests of fishermen and livestock herders moving around in areas that had been declared off-limits in Chad. As aerial surveillance has shown, many civilians continue to visit the islands regularly to look after their livestock and crops. A new operation has just been launched and it needs to be drawn up in a way that avoids leaving civilian victims. The other strategic flaw is that Chad has difficulty in combining military and civil approaches and putting in place a civil administration. In the Lake region, the allocation of tasks has proved awkward: while several thousand troops are deployed there, the involvement of the civil authorities remains limited. The army’s reluctance to reveal its movements and its assessment of the real threats posed by Boko Haram obstructs humanitarian action. For as long as the lake remains a militarised zone and the restrictions of the state of emergency – not formally extended but de facto still in force – continue to affect the movements of local inhabitants and their production economy, it will remain difficult for the state to really gain their confidence. Yet, it is only by gaining their trust that the threat posed by Boko Haram can be completely eliminated over the long term. The Chadian authorities find themselves unprepared for the aforementioned wave of surrenders and people returning home; they struggle to determine the status of men who have been detained, whether Boko Haram fighters, helpers, prisoners or civilians. This hinders their ability to make appropriate provision for them or to define meaningful programs of reintegration. On 17 February 2017, Chad’s minister of public security and immigration, Ahmat Mahamat Bachir, met the peace and security commissioner of the African Union to draw up a strategy for managing these returns home. Yet, so far the authorities are struggling to cope. The absence of a clear policy on the conditions for rehabilitation, reintegration or trial of Boko Haram’s former members or helpers is probably hindering the scope for a further acceleration in the pace of surrenders. Finally, in a broader perspective, the greatest threat to the stability of Chad over the long term is not Boko Haram – although it is necessary to fight this group with determination – but a national political crisis that would create fertile conditions for the emergence of all kinds of violent actors, particularly in the regions where the state is almost absent. For now, the populations of the Lake region suffer the most from the impact of Boko Haram. V.The Impact of the Crisis on the Populations The extension of the Boko Haram phenomenon across the lake and the Chadian shore still carries security risks and could potentially destabilise this cosmopolitan region where cohabitation remains fragile. Besides the seasonal movements of people, the successive influxes of displaced civilians, refugees or repatriated people to the shores of the lake since January 2015 have sometimes affected social cohesion. In January 2017, humanitarian agencies reported that there were 100,765 registered displaced people in the region, together with almost 21,000 who had been displaced but were not yet registered and close to 7,000 mainly Nigerian refugees. For the most part, these populations had fled to escape Boko Haram abuses or come under pressure from national armies to leave the islands. While networks of support within communities – or between them – softened the impact of these shocks, these stabilisers are fragile; host communities have only a limited capacity to absorb arrivals. The majority of displaced people, particularly the Buduma, have been accommodated on sites that sprang up unplanned, with only a minority finding refuge in declared “host villages”.Against a background of economic difficulties, and with the region becoming militarised, the population’s resilience has been put under huge strain. A.The Impact on the Lake’s Economy As in Niger, where restrictions and bans have been even more draconian, trade on the Chadian islands and shore of the lake has been severely affected by Boko Haram’s activity, while the state of emergency, renewed on several occasions, remains unofficially in effect, even though it has not been formally prolonged since October 2016. Although the rules governing motorbike travel and even fishing have recently been relaxed, there are still circulation constraints, curfews remain in place and economic activity is sluggish. The border with Nigeria, the main outlet for trade, remains officially closed, even though some activity, particularly livestock movements, seems to have resumed informally. In this context, occasional large concentrations of livestock cause local epidemics of disease and consequent heavy losses for herders. Some, therefore, take their herds via alternative routes through Niger to sell them in Nigerien border markets where prices are higher. Agriculture and fishing have also been affected, although the last farming season was much better than 2015, slightly improving food security indicators in Chad, particularly in the lake area. Increased economic fragility certainly affects Boko Haram finances, but it also leaves the populations of the islands, the lakeshores and the wider Lake Chad basin in a more vulnerable position. Many displaced people are now dependent on food aid and want to resume their normal activities. New demographic pressures and economic insecurity combine with old rivalries and demands over indigenous community rights. The latter pose no problem for the most part; they relate to the Buduma and Kouri, who establish their camps in the northern basin, sometimes far from villages or public services, insisting that: “our ancestors and our parents used to live here”. But in more populated areas, the management of land rights is more complicated and, in the wake of Boko Haram attacks, there have been some cases of confrontation between communities, particularly over access to resources. An example is the December 2015 attack on Koulfoua that left many victims, and was the result of tensions between Kanembu and Buduma over access to a source of water supply. And there have been many reports of lakeshore villagers attacking displaced Buduma women looking for firewood on the edge of Baga Sola. There have been no direct clashes over access to polders, but the issue has stirred frustration among some communities who feel excluded from using those lands. And finally, conflicts between traditional chiefs have sparked the break-up of some camps for displaced people. Since early 2016, with the number of Boko Haram attacks in Chad much reduced, there has been a sharp decline in inter-communal tensions, although many remain. B.The Risk of Community Tensions and Stigmatisation Boko Haram has certainly tried to exploit tensions over inter-communal or identity issues, in a bid to attract support. Such strains are not new in this area and they have various causes. They are above all the consequence of competition over the resources of a lake that has become very attractive in economic terms. Constant variations in the levels of wet season flooding have produced significant population movements – and disputes between interest groups and communities for control of the constantly shifting fringe development areas. Before the crisis, there were tensions both within and between ethnic groups. For instance, the different Buduma clans – the Guriya in Bol, the May Bulwa around Kriska, the Majigojiya or the Bujiya in Niger – engaged in internecine struggles. The presence of Boko Haram has certainly contributed to the increasingly ethnicised nature of these tensions and the emergence of new ethnic stigmatisation. There is also intense rivalry over the control of commercial activities. To the west of the lake, Arabs and Hausa have long tussled over the livestock trade. On the lake itself, fishing areas and the market for transport in canoes and outboard-powered boats have often been the subject of tension, as has the ownership of dry farmland. On the Chadian shore, mid-twentieth century rivalries between the Kanembu and the Buduma, notably over the status of Bol, remain in the collective memory. Over time, social domination has emerged, with the Kanembu taking over some of the towns of the southern basin of the lake, securing control of property and trade and establishing a near-monopoly on the sale of specific products in local markets: young goats, rush mats, bundles of firewood, etc. More recently, the various Buduma clans – which, with the Kouri, claim the ownership of many islands and impose levies on other fishermen and herders – have expressed concerns that their control of the islands could be challenged, particularly by Fulani and Arab pastoralists from both Niger and Chad. They have reportedly organised themselves to resist or contain movements by the main migratory pastoralist groups across the lake: “They blocked the Arabs’ path, so that they did not come,” said a researcher. This competition over land is certainly connected to the repeated confrontations between pastoralist communities in Niger, particularly in the tri-border area, over the past six months. This complex local reality has sometimes been characterised in simplistic terms: “The Buduma have reportedly allied with Boko Haram in order to keep control of the lake”. As so often in the context of terrorism, the finger of guilt is pointed at a particular community – with the scapegoating of the Kanuri in Nigeria and Cameroon and at one point, the Buduma in Chad and Niger. “They are the Boko Haram guys,” a refugee said of them in 2015 in the Baga Sola camp. In the wake of the attack on Baga Sola market in October 2015 – in which one of the suicide bombers was the daughter of a well-known local notable – some Buduma women were beaten up and, in some cases, excluded from the market; others were allegedly refused access to health centres. Collective perceptions and prejudices that had developed over time fuelled these deep inter-communal mistrusts. Talk of the Buduma as “naïve and ready to embrace any cause out of opportunism” is widespread among lakeshore communities. The authorities certainly played a role in this stigmatisation in 2015, before taking steps to correct course. The replacement of the former governor by Adoum Forteye, a native of the region, helped the administration to reconnect with local people. Other sensible moves have been efforts to integrate Buduma into the army – which led to a call for applications in July 2016 – and Déby’s request for the preparation of a program to recruit young people from the region into the public service, which has yet to be implemented. By early 2017, tensions seem to have eased, probably because of the improvement in security conditions on the Chadian shore of the lake. Indeed, there is a strong correlation between the number of attacks carried out by Boko Haram and the stigmatising of particular communities. Any new attack, whether in N’Djamena or on the lakeshore, could generate further cycles of inter-communal reprisals, thus triggering or accelerating the emergence of a crisis. VI.Preparing for Stabilisation and Relaunching Development A.From Emergency to Development: Local Conditions Informing Appropriate Policies Nigeria’s north east is the scene of a humanitarian disaster almost unprecedented in the region, becoming one of the main emergencies for the UN. The situation is different on the Chadian side of the lake, where the impact of Boko Haram has been less severe than in neighbouring countries. After a very troubled initial response in 2015, humanitarian provision is much better today, albeit still insufficient. Levels of vulnerability among the host populations and displaced people remain significant and the security risks hinder access for NGOs to areas such as Tchoukoutalia and Kaiga Kindjiria. At times, humanitarian aid has even been delivered by government services. Chad is currently considering how to coordinate the emergency response with development projects around the lake, to strengthen the long-term resilience of local communities. Numerous donors such as the World Bank, the European Union – through its Trust Fund, its stability instrument and the European Commission service for humanitarian aid (ECHO) – and both the French Development Agency and the African Development Bank, have already confirmed or signalled their intention to invest in such projects. But their timetables differ and the projects that will mobilise the greatest funding volumes are set to begin in 2018 or 2019. The allocation of large sums to the lake’s development, although necessary, is not without risk. In line with the Do No Harm policy, a prior evaluation of the impact of each dollar spent is required to avoid inadvertently reinforcing any of the factors that fuel the crisis. In this highly distinctive region, characterised by high population growth and constant fluctuations in the water level of the lake, mobility has been key to maintaining a balance between the communities. Yet today, the large military deployment and the presence of Boko Haram compromise mobility and disrupt traditional means of settling conflicts, land management, fishing campaigns and livestock transhumance. Development actors should finance a socio-anthropological study to get an understanding of the factors that shape the structure of households, lead people to move and activity to become increasingly concentrated, and, above all, to identify priorities together with local people so that they can take ownership of this agenda. The question of project scale should also be addressed. For example, some researchers press the case for prioritising numerous small developments to avoid reviving fierce competition between communities. Moreover, while these projects may be essential, the relation between underdevelopment and radicalisation is not always obvious. Development projects need to have much broader objectives than “deradicalisation” or “the prevention of extremist violence” to avoid the risk of local people regarding development activity and security measures as inextricably linked. To make a success of the transition from emergency support to development, it is essential that the government gives more attention to the question of Lake Chad’s future. The FCFA3 billion in public investment for the area promised by President Déby in early 2016 is an unrealistic figure and, so far, the lake issue has served as a tool for attracting international aid. N’Djamena gives few details about its “plan for the lake”. Will it remain a militarised area? Does the government recommend to return displaced populations to the islands or, alternatively, settling them on the lakeshore? National authorities should put forward clear options for the future evolution of the lake area and multiply the number of field visits. Finally, in partnership with the donors and in consultation with local communities and their representatives, it should put forward a plan outlining these scenarios over a period of time – for example, one year and five years. Finally, the risk that financial resources will be concentrated on the lake, to the detriment of other regions, should not be dismissed. Chad is a very poor country with many communities in a precarious situation. It is also – at least until 2015 – the country with the seventh highest refugee population in the world. The refugees who arrived from Darfur between 2003 and 2005 are still living in camps along the Sudanese border, while large numbers of Central Africans are gathered in the south. In both cases, the prospects for returning are limited, yet humanitarian assistance has fallen sharply. Levels of malnutrition remain very high right across the Sahelian belt, while in the north of the country public services are almost inexistent. It would make sense to rebalance the project agenda of the government and Chad’s main partners to avoid neglecting other disregarded regions – which could also become fertile ground for various violent groups. B.Rebuilding a Positive Relationship with the State While the response to Boko Haram will necessarily include development actions, the relaunch of the local production economy and trade with neighbouring countries, it should also encompass the consolidation of links between the Chadian state and a region that has long been in the orbit of Borno state, in Nigeria. A purely military approach cannot reestablish confidence between N’Djamena and this outlying area. Although the current governor does exercise considerable control over his administration, the military operation against Boko Haram carries the risk of creating a permanent state of crisis around the lake, subjecting the region to de facto military rule over the long term. Boko Haram constitutes a long-term threat, but it is necessary to move on from the purely military stage into a phase of political stabilisation. Devolution currently underway and the redrawing of administrative boundaries have not bolstered public service provision. The first response, therefore, must be the development of better administrative coverage which, besides creating new sub-prefectures, would envisage the deployment of public servants to revive social services. Under such a scheme, temporary bonuses could be paid to officials who agree to be posted to this area. The presence of Zaghawa colonels among the new sub-prefects and the arrests of livestock herders and fishermen do not help to reestablish confidence. Furthermore, under the state of emergency, the military only permit access to farmland where they consider that security is adequate. A new approach is needed, which would see military sub-prefects quickly replaced by civilians and a relaxation of the state of emergency rules to encourage mobility and the resumption of economic activity. In the same vein, while trade, particularly the movement of livestock between Chad and Nigeria, appears to be slowly resuming, the reopening of a protected channel could encourage trade between the two shores of the lake and thus improve living conditions for local people. Furthermore, to avoid the long-term militarisation of the region, it is necessary to build a genuine civilian component into the operation now underway. The state should facilitate the recruitment of local civilians and establish strict disciplinary procedures for dealing with soldiers who commit abuses against the civilian population. And finally, as the countries of the region have just launched a new major operation, it is essential to reduce the human cost of military manoeuvres by drawing the sharpest possible distinction between insurgents and local inhabitants who have returned to the islands to cultivate their fields, go fishing or graze their animals. C.Dealing with Prisoners and Deserters With more and more surrenders, arrangements should be put in place to look after prisoners and deserters, in the hope that this will encourage further desertions. At present, the deeply flawed Chadian judicial system fails to deal with the Boko Haram issue: since the start of the conflict only one – much criticised – trial has been organised, resulting in the imposition of death sentences on ten suspected members of the group. Today, between 500 and 1,000 suspected Boko Haram members are reportedly detained at Koro Toro, a prison located in the desert, near Faya Largeau, and dubbed the “Chadian Guantanamo”. The prisoners, drawn from various ethnic groups (Kanuri, Hausa, Buduma) and nationalities (including Sudanese and Nigerians), have one thing in common: they have all been locked up without prior judgement and for indefinite periods. Some might be active members of Boko Haram but others are business people, including some SIM card vendors. This situation carries risks. In Nigeria, the lack of transparency about judicial procedures has created resentment among affected families and thus become a driver for Boko Haram recruitment. While the prospect of organising fair trials still appears remote, it is crucial that the authorities develop the capacity to distinguish between the most hardline elements of Boko Haram and those who give it occasional help. Appropriate arrangements for each category would represent a first step toward preventing new recruitments. It is therefore essential to define a clear policy on the conditions attached to rehabilitating former Boko Haram members or putting them on trial – and the outline of a serious program of rehabilitation for deserters, as part of wider programs of support for community recovery, targeted at youth in particular. Chadian authorities should draw up a document setting out the framework for dealing with the surrender of Boko Haram members – like the one recently produced by Niger’s interior ministry – and communicate it to their international partners. And finally, besides awareness campaigns already underway, a major focus on communications is needed to improve the relationship between the government and the population, and to persuade undecided members of Boko Haram to turn themselves in and provide reassurance about the fate that awaits them if they do so. This could take the form of a mass text message campaign setting out the conditions for surrender. Another tool could be support for community radio stations, or the creation of such stations, to broadcast awareness messages about conflict prevention in local languages. Talk shows, vox pop reporting and interviews could help local people express their views. Such efforts need to be carried out both at the very local level, with appropriate and sustainable tools, and at the regional level, given the degree of integration and mobility among the lake populations. The Chadian side of the lake is particularly short of community radio provision. But a number of projects, particularly those being developed in Nigeria, could be extended to cover the linguistic diversity of the region. VII.Conclusion Boko Haram has lost ground and the security situation today is much better than in 2015 on the Chadian islands and lakeshore. But the jihadist insurgency’s resilience is well proven. The threat that it poses to local people will not diminish until the structural problems in Nigeria’s Borno state are tackled. In light of this reality, a strategic change is required. The military interventions by countries in the Lake region – certainly necessary to curb Boko Haram’s progression – and the restrictions imposed on mobility and trade have an obvious impact on the everyday life of local people. This situation is not sustainable over the long term. The Chadian state, like its neighbours, now needs to replace its purely military management of the crisis with the indispen­sable relaunch of trade and production activity and set out clear programs for the reinsertion into society of former Boko Haram fighters. It also needs to fight against all the ways in which particular communities are stigmatised; and a strong political effort is required to rebuild a relationship between N’Djamena and outlying areas. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 International Crisis Group

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Peoples Tribunal On Myanmar

Mr. Tognoni Secretary General Permanent People’s Tribunal Rome, Italy On behalf of the High Commissioner for Human Rights,​​ Mr. Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein I would like to thank you for your letters and invitation to public proceedings of the PTT planned to be held in London on 6-7 March 2017. Neither the High Commissioner nor any of our staff are able to attend the hearing for number of reasons, including very short notice. However, this Office (OHCHR) have of course followed very closely situation in Mynamar, including in the norther part of Rakhine state. OHCHR has issued a report on the situation with human rights in Myanmar last year (attached) and recently, upon fielding an investigative mission to Bangladesh, a flash report as a result of in-depth interviews with Rohingya refugees who fled Myanmar to Bangladesh since 9 October 2016. You may wish also to consult numerous reports of the Special Rapporteur on Myanmar, all available on our website. I very much hope this will be helpful to your proceedings. Kind regards, Anton Nikiforov Executive Office / OHCHR Geneva +4122-9179835 office ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 The Peoples Tribunal On Myanmar

Little Rohingya girl by the barbed wire fence On March 6-7, representatives of Rohingya and Kachin victim groups of Myanmar are presenting first-hand, live and recorded, testimonies about crimes allegedly committed by the Myanmar state against their groups to the Rome-based Permanent People’s Tribunal. They will bring forth the charges that the Myanmar government is committing crimes, such as war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Additionally, expert witnesses from around the world, including Professor Penny Green (QMUL), Dr Mandy Sadan (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), Azril Mohamed Amin (Centre for Human Rights Research and Advocacy, Malaysia), are testifying on specific crimes and/or the historical context of grave violations under international law. Rohingya lady with fearful and sad eyes Video-recorded testimonies of Rohingya rape victims, who recently fled to Bangladesh, will also be presented to the Panel of Jury. The Dalai Lama has issued a formal statement, which will be released during the press conference of the Opening Sessions, on Tuesday 7th March. The Tibetan Buddhist leader disclosed that he has ‘privately communicated to Nobel Laureate ad Burmese leader Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’ about his concerns regarding the persecution of the Rohingya. Among the initial Panel of Jury, are Prof Daniel Feierstein, renowned genocide scholar & former President of the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS), Dr Helen Jarvis, former Public Affairs Officer at the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, and Denis Halliday, UN Assistant Secretary-General (1994-98) and winner of Gandhi International Peace Award 2003. The inaugural session in London will be hosted at, and webcast live from, the ISCI of QMUL, on 6th March (1000 GMT to 1800 GMT) and 7th March (0900 GMT – 1200 GMT). Rohingya young men with the armed guard The opening session will end with a press conference at 1200 GMT. An announcement about the full and final session to be held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, will be made at the end of Tuesday’s proceedings. The tribunal sessions which are open to public, can be viewed live at http://tribunalonmyanmar.org/ & followed on twitter @MyanmarTribunal, #MyanmarTribunal The People’s Tribunal on Myanmar has been endorsed by over 20 Rohingya, Kachin & Burmese organizations worldwide, International State Crime Initiative of QMUL, S. Africa’s Protect the Rohingya Campaign, Genocide Watch, Burma Task Force USA, Malaysian human rights networks such as JUST and Centhra, and individual genocide prevention campaigners including Youk Chhang of Cambodia. Rohingya rape victim Burma Task Force USA said the Tribunal is a people’s initiative, made possible by the generous support of the ISCI, QMUL, individual activists: Mark Sampson, Ko Aung, the Rohingya community in London, and Burma Task Force (USA), and Women collective for people's rights, Lecco, Italy. All 1.5 day sessions to be webcast LIVE by Oxford Digital Media: https://www.oxforddigitalmedia.com/media-gallery/ Webcast can be viewed on the official Tribunal website at: http://tribunalonmyanmar.org/ Tribunal proceedings may be followed on twitter @MyanmarTribunal #MyanmarTribunal : Contact email: info@TribunalOnMyanmar.org ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 India Blooms News Service

A displaced Syrian family unload their belongings at a makeshift camp for displaced people near the town of Manbij, Syria. (Delil Souleiman/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images) ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey has ordered Oregon-based Mercy Corps, one of the largest humanitarian organizations delivering aid to Syria, to immediately shut down its Turkish operations, ending a program that provides regular assistance to hundreds of thousands of besieged Syrian civilians and refugees. “Our hearts are broken by this turn of events, which comes after five years of cooperation with the government of Turkey and other partners,” spokeswoman Christine Bragale said in a statement early Wednesday. It was unclear whether other aid organizations have been similarly affected, and Turkish government officials could not immediately be reached for comment. Bragale said that no specific reason had been given and that “we continue to seek a dialogue with Turkish authorities” and “remain hopeful that the government of Turkey will allow us to return to serve those in critical need.” Turkey has admitted more than 3 million refugees fleeing violence in Syria, and towns and cities along its southern border have been a hub for sending humanitarian supplies into the war-torn country. Mark Toner, acting spokesman for the State Department, said it was aware of the situation with Mercy Corps, which he called a “valuable partner” in delivering humanitarian assistance to needy Syrian refugees. “We have informed the government of Turkey of our concerns regarding Mercy Corps’ closure and the impact it will have on their ability to provide critical humanitarian assistance to vulnerable populations,” he said. Mercy Corps’ expulsion is likely to increase growing tension along Syria’s northwest border, where the myriad military forces involved in a civil war and the separate fight against the Islamic State have converged in pursuit of conflicting objectives. Turkish forces, along with Syrian rebel allies, crossed the border last fall to clear part of the area of Islamic State fighters. The larger Turkish goal has been to prevent U.S.-backed ­Syrian Kurds, whom Turkey considers terrorists, from expanding their control over the border region. Turkey has said it wants to create a safe zone inside Syria along the border, 60 miles long and about 28 miles deep. But that area would include the town of Manbij, taken from the Islamic State last summer, with U.S. assistance, by the joint Kurdish and Arab Syrian Democratic Forces, or SDF. The U.S. military hopes to use the SDF, bolstered with recruits, to capture the city of Raqqa, the Islamic State’s Syrian capital, in an offensive planned for this year. Turkey has objected, and its force is headed toward Manbij. To head them off, Russian and Syrian government troops have moved into villages west of the town, and U.S. Special Forces arrived in Manbij last weekend. The growing controversy brought together the top military officials from Turkey, the United States and Russia on Tuesday in the Turkish city of Antalya, a new step in exploring how military operations by the three countries will occur in increasingly tight quarters in Syria. The meeting between Marine Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Russian Gen. Valery Gerasimov; and Turkish Gen. Hulusi Akar was at Turkey’s invitation. It marked the second meeting in a month between Dunford and Gerasimov, as senior U.S. military officials have called for increased talks to “deconflict” operations in Syria and make sure there are no collisions between U.S. and Russian aircraft. Under a framework established in 2015, a U.S. colonel in Qatar and a Russian counterpart in Syria discuss the locations of operations their countries are carrying out in Syria without sharing intelligence. Russia has pushed to expand collaboration in Syria, something that President Trump has said he would favor in the fight against the Islamic State. Even as they vie for Turkey’s support, both the United States and Russia have cooperated with the Syrian Kurdish People’s Protection Units, or YPG. Turkey has labeled the YPG an affiliate of the separatist Turkish Kurdistan Workers’ party, which Washington and Ankara have designated a terrorist group. In a statement, the Joint Chiefs of Staff said the three generals gathered to discuss “regional security matters in Syria and Iraq, specifically the current situation of the fight against all terrorist organizations in Syria, with an effort to wage a more effective fight against all terrorist organizations in the future and the importance of additional measures for de-conflicting operations.” Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim told a news conference that more coordination among the three is needed. Carol Morello in Washington and Liz Sly in Beirut contributed to this report. (C) 2017 The Washington Post

Donald Trump’s new executive order affects citizens from six of the seven countries originally named. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP Donald Trump’s revised travel ban will increase the woes of the world’s refugees, the United Nations has said, as some of the Muslim-majority countries affected by the ban expressed their disappointment, insisting they had fully cooperated with US anti-terrorist efforts. The executive order blocks entry to the US for citizens from six of the seven countries named in Trump’s original order – Iran, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, Syria and Libya – for a period of 90 days and suspends the US refugee programme for 120 days. The UN high commissioner for refugees, Filippo Grandi, said refugees were not criminals but “ordinary people forced to flee war, violence and persecution in their home countries”. The secretary general, António Guterres, pointedly made an emergency visit to Somalia, saying people were dying in the country due to famine. But overall the reaction to the reordered ban was more muted than the outrage at the chaotic announcement of Trump’s original executive order on 27 January. The subdued response is partly because it was widely expected, delivered with less fanfare and at least will not be implemented for a week, ensuring air passengers will not be thrown off planes just before takeoff in a repeat of the desperate scenes that accompanied the first ban. On Tuesday, 6 Sudanese refugees in Cairo were permitted to travel to New York. The Sudanese foreign ministry said it was disappointed with the revised executive order. Iranian foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi said Tehran would wait and see the details of the new executive order and “would react in proportion”. Iran’s deputy foreign minister says Iran’s “retaliatory decision” over Trump’s initial travel ban is still in place.Iran’s semi-official ISNA news agency quoted the deputy foreign minister, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, saying the measures Iran implemented after the original ban on entry for US citizens were still in force and there was no need for a new decision. Libya, currently gripped by renewed fighting to control its oil terminals, put out no fresh statement regarding the new executive order. The revised ban now excludes Iraq, a country alongside which the US is currently fighting to defeat Islamic State in Mosul. The Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, was advised not to take reciprocal action against Trump’s original order, despite significant pressure from the Iraq parliament to do so, and his self-restraint – and lobbying – appears to have paid off. Some other small changes also make it less vulnerable to legal challenges. The new order clarifies that permanent residents, existing visa holders, people already admitted as refugees or granted asylum, and dual citizens can enter the US. But Grandi said the UN remained concerned. “The imperative remains to provide protection for people fleeing deadly violence, and we are concerned that this decision, though temporary, may compound the anguish for those it affects,” he said. “Americans have long played a crucial role in promoting global stability while simultaneously exemplifying the highest humanitarian ideals, from support for refugee emergencies overseas, to welcoming some of the most vulnerable refugee families in the United States to rebuild their lives in safety, freedom and dignity,” he said. “This is the gold standard in refugee protection and a powerful model for all countries that, at a time of record-high levels of forced human displacement, this kind of humane leadership is needed more than ever.” The largest concentration of refugees directly affected are likely to be nearly 15,000 Somalis in a Kenyan refugee camp who fled their war-torn country and hoped to resettle in the US. The Somali president, Mohamed Abdullahi Mohamed, who met Guterres in Mogadishu, called for the US ban to be lifted and insisted his country had the capacity to fight terrorism. The main Gulf states, such as Saudi Arabia, remain exempt from the ban. Saudi Arabia, which is seeking better relations with Trump on issues such as Syria and Yemen, said very little about the ban when it was first announced and continued its policy of discretion on Tuesday. The Organisation of Islamic Cooperation last month criticised the earlier order describing it as “selective and discriminatory”. The OIC said it was of the view that the ban will further complicate the grave situation that refugees find themselves. In Britain the shadow foreign secretary, Emily Thornberry, described the ban as a retrograde step for the US despite what she called “some cosmetic changes” in its revised version. “By abdicating its responsibilities under international law, the administration continues to send a terrible message to the rest of the world on the refugee crisis,” she said. “While it remains to be seen whether or not this new executive order will stand up in court, nothing in this announcement changes the fact that these measures are unnecessary, divisive and wrong.” The Australian prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said the deal would not affect the US commitment to take refugees from the Manus Island and Nauru refugee centres. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ (c) 2017 Guardian News and Media Limited