Trouble next door

Three days ago on a road only 200 km away from the capital two doctors, local aid workers on a child vaccination mission in the provinces, and their driver were stopped, pulled out of their car, ordered to lie down and shot dead in cold blood by a group of armed, arabic speaking elements, believed to be from the neigbouring country Chad. The bodies of two peuhls (local nomads) also shot dead were found nearby. We are no longer talking about 'ordinary' highways bandits ("coupeurs de route") who usually only rob, sometimes roughen up, but only rarely actually kill people, but who they really are is not clear.

Rebels have attacked the Chadian capital N'Djamena, where fighting broke out between them and government troops this morning. Right now the situation seems to have calmed down. These rebels came from Sudan (Darfur) but passed (about 200 men in 21 pickups) through the northern part of our host country to enter Chad. In fact they must have passed through the nature reserve where we went recently: there are no other passable roads in that area.

Yesterday and today we have been following the situation in Chad very closely. In fact, our host country's President came to power in 2003 with the help of Idriss Deby, and the latter's fall would have immediate consequences for stability here. As the news about the doctors makes clear, that stability is in ever greater jeopardy anyway.

Because of the fighting in N'Djamena the boss, who is on a mission to Cameroon with another colleague from the office, didn't have a return plane this morning as he was flying with a Chadian company. I have just arranged for a private plane to go and pick him up this afternoon.

As always, I wonder where we are heading. The situation in the country is tricky enough as it is, and external developments like in Chad and Darfur can tilt the balance suddenly.

I have been quite pessimistic these days about our chances to get anything done with government services. Here we have a country in dire need of among much else public finance reform, and instead of whipping up his people to work on these reforms, the Minister of Finance spends most of his time abroad on long missions the purpose of which nobody can explain to me, apart from the apparently fat per diems... We're hoping to disburse long awaited budgetary aid soon. All we need is for the government to prepare a certain disbursement file, and we have send them a reminder the 22 of March. I called the Vice Minister last week, the boss brought it up with the Minister last friday, and in the end it was one of our experts who put the services concerned to work on it yesterday... Incompetence and lethargy know no limits here. Right now we have three customs experts on the ground with a total of more than a century of experience between them, and they are stunned by the mess they are discovering.

So I would like to do a lot more with the population itself. We have a big microproject programme coming on steam, and guess what: it looks like it will be hard to actually do things if security on the ground continues to deteriorate like this and even doctors are not safe anymore.

As the boss is stuck in Cameroon, I will have to take his place at an official state dinner for the corps diplomatique this afternoon offered by the President to the departing Ambassador of France. Sounds glamorous, but I can assure you that I am in for a few hours of utter boredom. Just for fun I could pick a fight with the Deputy Minister of Finance, tell him that his services are as useless as I told him recently....