5-25-06, 9:38 am

NDJAMENA, 25 May 2006 (IRIN) - Militia fighters armed with machetes, knives and guns killed over 100 people in eastern Chad last month, including more than 75 people in one village alone, but there is no definitive proven link between the attackers and the Sudanese government, according to researchers from Human Rights Watch.

In the village of Jawara, which was visited last month by researchers from the US rights NGO, 38 people gathered together praying under a tree were killed in one swoop. Another 37 who came back to the village later to bury the dead were also massacred, HRW said.

Those attacks took place on 12 and 13 April, according to villagers. That week, rebel groups were seeping across the semi-arid central African country to launch an attack on the capital N'djamena and remove President Idriss Deby.

HRW said it also learnt of a further 43 people killed in three villages close to Jawara in eastern Chad at around the same time. 'The bodies were still out in the open. There were blood stains on the floor, machetes, and bodies,' said HRW researcher David Buchbinder.

'These attacks were deeper inside Chad than we have ever seen before, and there were far more people killed -- we are talking about hundreds of people butchered with machetes and knives,' he said.

HRW researchers spoke to IRIN in N'djamena after a six-week visit to camps and villages across eastern Chad, which borders Sudan’s troubled western Darfur region.

Chad's government has blamed the Sudanese government in Khartoum for sponsoring militia groups to enter Chad with the goal of destabilising the Deby’s government. The same groups are blamed for violence in the Darfur region, where around two million people have been displaced by fighting.

In the east of the country, Chadians have been arriving at informal camps for displaced people by the truckload in recent weeks, almost all because they are too afraid of attacks to stay in their villages, aid agencies have said.

HRW said it had gathered evidence of Sudanese army soldiers being involved in attacks on Chadian civilians. It showed IRIN copies of Sudanese army badges, identity papers, and personal documents, it said were taken off militia members killed in eastern Chad.

However, the HRW researchers said they were unable to decisively prove a link between the Sudanese government in Khartoum and the militias operating in Chad.

'The Human Rights Watch definition of a Janjawid is an Arab militiaman trained and equipped by the Sudanese government to implement their missions,' HRW counsel Oliver Bercault said in N'djamena.

'Now we have people crossing the border with the same equipment as was used in Sudan, but we can't link these people, even the Sudanese guys, with Khartoum. We could clearly link the evidence with Khartoum in Darfur, but not in Chad,' he said. Sometimes Chadians were among them.

People questioned by HRW in eastern Chad nonetheless blame the Janjawid -- an Arabic word that means 'devils on horseback' -- for the attacks against then.

According to HRW some of the attacked villages do appear to have been re-occupied by Arab families, although others are deserted.

'A white flag in a village means it has brokered a deal with the Janjawid,' said Buchbinder. “There are other villages which locals don't go to because they say ‘the Janjawid live there now,’” he added.

But 'Janjawid has just become a word that means someone Arab or someone who attacks you,' said Buchbinder. The HRW researchers said they found that militia groups were still active throughout eastern Chad, especially around the town of Kou Kou, 80 kilometres from the Chadian border and less than 10 kilometres from a refugee camp at Goz Amir.

Among the more than 200,000 Darfur refugees in eastern Chad, some of whom have been living in camps for longer than three years, aid agencies say there are a disproportionate number of women and children, as many of the men were killed in attacks in Darfur.

'Most of the people in the camps have had family members killed in attacks, so they are very sympathetic to the (Darfur) rebellion,' said Buchbinder.

The UN refugee agency UNHCR has said many Chadians are being forcibly recruited to join Darfuri militia groups that have crossed into Chad to regroup and rest, before returning to Darfur to fight.

But Buchbinder said in many camps HRW found no evidence that people were being forcibly recruited into the militias. He said people are instead joining the rebel groups freely and are 'very sympathetic to the rebellion.'

'Part of the background static of life in the camps is recruitment,' he said, adding that recruitment is 'assisted by people who are passing through and say, come on, come fight for your homeland.'