Chad rebuffed a proposal by France on Thursday to set up a humanitarian corridor through its territory to channel aid to victims of violence in Sudan's Darfur, saying it did not see the need for such a strategy.
"Chad does not need this corridor because there is a perfect and full cooperation between the Chadian authorities and the United Nations organisations," Prime Minister Nouradine Delwa Kassire Coumakoye told a news conference in N'Djamena.
According to French officials, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner is working on an initiative to create a secure aid corridor or corridors through Chad's violence-torn east, where several UN agencies run large-scale relief operations.
The idea foresees that French and European Union troops would protect the flow of aid to hundreds of thousands of refugees and displaced civilians in Chad and Sudan's Darfur, where ethnic and political conflict has raged since 2003.
Chadian officials said they had received no formal proposal from France so far about the initiative, which French spokesmen said Kouchner was raising with France's G8 and EU partners and with China, a major military and economic backer of Sudan.
"The French foreign minister has talked about it. And it's not fair," Coumakoye said, apparently referring to the fact that Chad's government had not been formally consulted.