By Adelia Saunders
11 March 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: Rebel forces have attacked N’Djamena, the capital of Chad, twice in the past two years, and each time the world’s eyes turned to Beijing.
At the time of the first attacks in April, 2006, China and Chad were not on diplomatic speaking terms, and widespread reports that the rebels carried Chinese weapons left Beijing fending off allegations that its growing economic support for Sudan was fueling cross-border violence. When rebels stormed the city six weeks ago, China faced a different kind of task—evacuating Chinese workers from an oil refinery, Chad’s first, that they were building as part of an US$80 million package of loans and development initiatives granted in exchange for a significant share of the country’s as yet unplumbed oil reserves.
The relationship between China, the powerhouse of the developing world, and Chad, a landlocked nation in the heart of Africa that the United Nations ranks eighth poorest in the world, has shifted dramatically. Following the first attacks by rebels widely believed to be backed by Sudan, Chad broke off diplomatic relations with Taiwan, China’s political antagonist, and formally welcomed Beijing.
“The switch—Taiwan to Beijing—seems to be a very coincidental switch,” said Dr. David Shinn, former U.S. Ambassador to Ethiopia and Burkina Faso and an expert on Sino-African relations, in an interview with MediaGlobal. By changing allegiances, Chad may have sought to ally itself with one of the only countries in the world to claim a sizable influence over its increasingly belligerent neighbor, Sudan.
“If that was the thinking of the Chadian government, it seems not to have worked very effectively,” Shinn said. When rebels attacked the capital in February, in what appeared to be another Sudanese-backed attempt to overthrow Chadian President Idriss Deby, China remained largely silent.
Meanwhile, the Asian giant has been pursuing its economic interests in the country. It has secured the rights to explore a potentially oil-rich region in southwestern Chad, and has made plans to build roads, irrigation systems and a cement factory.
“It is in the Chinese interest to pressure the Sudanese to be a lot more reasonable,” Chad’s Foreign Minister, Ahmad Allam-Mi, told MediaGlobal during a recent visit to UN Headquarters. “China is making some effort to exert more pressure on Sudan so that we can broker a dialogue, so that we can normalize our relations. But we trust that China will do yet more, it is not yet enough.”
“Obviously, at this point, it’s not in China’s interests to have conflict between Chad and Sudan,” Shinn said. “It’s in their interests to have peace between those two countries so that China can get on with its oil interests in both countries.”
Chad’s hopes for more active intervention from Beijing may be overwhelmed by the increasing complexity of China’s economic and political investments in the region. Sudan is China’s number one source of imported oil. And while its petroleum interests in Chad have yet to produce, “China’s very careful about courting every country on the continent, irrespective of how important it might be,” Shinn said. “China’s made very clear that it’s in Africa for the long term. Unlike a lot of countries in the West, China really does tend to look more at a window that goes out 25, 50 years.”
China has high hopes for Chad’s oil fields, and, as it continues efforts to quash Taiwan’s bid for statehood, Chad counts as one more friendly vote in international forums. In return, Chad has received millions of dollars from China, primarily in the form of loans whose long-term benefit remains unclear. “A loan is a loan—in theory it still has to be repaid,” Shinn said. Many analysts fear China’s open purse in Africa will leave some of the poorest countries in the world saddled with sizable debt.
And China’s influence over Chad’s adversaries may not measure up to expectations. “I think that too many people have for too long ascribed too much power to China’s ability to influence events in Sudan,” Shinn said. “There tends to be this impression in much of the West that all China has to do is snap its fingers and the Sudanese will salute.”
Sudan, for its part, says it would welcome Chinese involvement in making peace with Chad. “The Chinese are very honest brokers,” Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem Mohamad, Sudan’s Ambassador to the UN, told MediaGlobal.
In a telling reminder of the complexity of China’s role in an increasingly unstable region, both the Chadian forces and the allegedly Sudanese-backed rebel troops appeared to be using Chinese guns during the February attacks, Penangnini Toure, Spokesperson for the UN mission in Chad, told MediaGlobal, adding that, as proof of Sudan’s involvement, “Chadian authorities displayed a box of ammunitions on which the word “Sudan” was clearly written.”
“These are fabrications,” Mohamad said. “Those who went to N’Djamena and surrounded the palace are Chadians. This is just a fabrication like the ones we hear every day against Sudan.”