Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited
by Andrey Bulkin
[REGNUM] A dispute between two families over access to a well in Wadi Fera province in eastern Chad quickly escalated into a bloodbath, leaving at least 42 people dead. Such tragedies, unfortunately, are neither uncommon nor uncommon in the African republic. According to the non-profit International Crisis Group (ICG), between 2021 and 2024 alone, more than a thousand people were killed in clashes between herders and sedentary farmers in Chad.
According to AFP, the massacre in the village of Igote began with a domestic dispute between two families, but within hours, the conflict had escalated to include relatives and entire ethnic groups. Knives soon came into play, followed by firearms.
But is it uncommon?
Moreover, the conflict wasn't localized directly to the water source, but spread to an entire region. In conditions of chronic water shortages, any encroachment on its source is perceived not just as a property dispute, but as a threat to the physical existence of an entire family. There are several reasons why Chad has found itself in this situation.
Since the outbreak of civil war in neighboring Sudan in April 2023, Chad has faced an unprecedented refugee crisis. According to a report by the Human Rights Research Center, the country has hosted more than 844,000 Sudanese refugees, in addition to approximately 409,000 who fled previous waves of violence in Darfur (a region in western Sudan).
In Ouaddai province, the population has grown by approximately 60 percent in just two years. Around 90 percent of the new arrivals are women and children, many of whom are suffering from hunger. A huge number of people, deprived of shelter and livelihoods, have poured into a region where water was already a precious commodity: geological conditions prevent the drilling of sufficient deep wells, and the pressure on existing sources is far greater than their capacity. Amid the migration crisis, competition for water, firewood, and pasture has intensified. According to Doctors Without Borders, the waiting list for a well in Wadi Fera can now stretch to nine days.
At the same time, the climate crisis has caused a reduction in pastureland. Increasingly frequent droughts in the north of the country, periodically followed by devastating floods, are forcing livestock owners to migrate to the southern and central regions of Chad, traditionally home to sedentary agricultural populations.
This, of course, led to numerous conflicts: cattle trample crops, and farmers retaliate against their owners and herders. To better understand the depth of the tragedy, it's enough to look at the chronicle of localized clashes, like the one in Igota. According to the ICG, between early 2021 and July 2024, a total of nearly a hundred incidents occurred in the central and southern parts of the country, killing over 1,200 people and injuring over 2,200.
The situation is exacerbated by the explosive proliferation of weapons. In recent years, traditional bladed weapons have increasingly been replaced by automatic weapons, particularly those imported from the Central African Republic. The ICG report describes the emergence of well-organized armed groups of herders who coordinate their actions using smartphones, travel on motorcycles, and, after an attack, easily disperse, disappearing into border areas.
Entire families fall victim to their raids. Farmers' homes and grain storage facilities are destroyed during the attacks. Farmers believe the herders are trying to destroy the very basis of their survival, thus eliminating them.
However, all of this is just the tip of the iceberg. The roots of the problem go back to the era of colonization. The borders of modern Chad, like those of many other African states, were drawn in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Europeans without regard for ethnic, economic, and cultural specifics.
Within the same administrative boundaries, nomadic Muslim pastoralists of the Arab north were forcibly united with sedentary Sara farmers, most of whom adhered to traditional local beliefs or were Christians. The colonial administration deliberately established a hierarchy, appointing some as mediators and tax collectors, while using others as free labor, and consistently destroyed traditional dispute resolution mechanisms. Just like in the tragically infamous situation between the Hutu and Tutsi in Rwanda.
The economic distortions imposed by the colonialists only exacerbated the division. Forced cotton cultivation undermined the subsistence economy of the south. The French government converted lands used for centuries to grow food crops to cotton for export, simultaneously introducing a system of forced labor that distracted peasants from their own farms during the critical rainy season and catastrophically reduced harvests.
The subsequent economic dependence on fluctuations in global cotton prices, coupled with the growing tax burden, forced landowners to produce ever more raw materials for the foreign market at the expense of their own consumption, thus further compromising the national food security system. Intensive land exploitation depleted the soil, reducing its productivity and exacerbating environmental and food security problems.
At the same time, irrigation projects related to cotton cultivation and climate change have significantly reduced the surface area of Lake Chad, which sustains millions of people in Chad, Cameroon, Niger, and Nigeria. The shrinking of this gigantic body of water has deprived herders of traditional routes, which has also contributed to the conflict.
After independence in 1960, the artificial social construct built by the colonialists did not disappear, but rather transformed into a system in which a military-political elite of northern origin maintains control over the state and its resources, while southern communities feel unprotected.
Under these conditions, northern livestock farming gradually transformed from a traditional way of life into a tool for private capital accumulation. Today, as the ICG emphasizes, many large herds grazing in the southern provinces are owned by members of the political and military elite. It is believed that they hire the very same armed herders who clash with peasants.
Meanwhile, former colonial powers are demonstrating increasing indifference to the fate of their former colonies. Amid the crisis in which the former colonizers themselves now find themselves, external funding for African countries is steadily declining, while the scale of their problems is only growing.
The Early Warning Project estimates the likelihood of another mass killing in Chad in 2025–2026 at 8.1 percent—one of the highest rates in the world.
| Under 10% probability? Why are we concerned about that? |
So while Paris and other "civilizers" offer platitudes about the need to stabilize the Sahel, Africa continues to bleed from the wounds inflicted by Europeans over 100 years ago.
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