14 Feb 2006: ISS Today: Chad: Rebel Leader Demands Change, by Force if Necessary

14 February 2006: “Chad rebel leader demands change, by force if necessary”
Opheera McDoom, Reuters

 

Mahamat Nour, leader of the Chadian rebel group Rally for Democracy and Liberty (RDL), has told Reuters that he is giving President Déby a final chance to convene a national forum to discuss democratic change, failing which the RDL, recently augmented by hundreds of military and political deserters from the Chadian government, will launch a determined attempt to oust the president.

 

 

Commentary:

 

In 1990 President Déby seized power in N’Djamena following a short campaign launched with Libyan and Sudanese assistance from bases in Darfur. Ironically he now faces the most serious threat to his rule emanating from the same region. A brief flirtation with the democratic process in the mid-1990s failed to defuse the rebellious tendencies of Chad’s desert-based nomads, nor did it ward off a number of coup attempts from within the Chadian military. Now, however, the situation has become critical. Déby’s attempts to secure power through constitutional manipulation and increasingly frequent military and political purges have seen his power base shrink with alarming rapidity, to the extent that even members of his immediate family are defecting. The presidential guard, suspected of disaffection, has been disbanded, and military parades to celebrate the sixteenth anniversary of Déby’s accession were cancelled for security reasons. Several hundred troops and their commanders have now joined new rebel movements forming on Chad’s border with Sudan, and Déby has accused Khartoum of supporting rebel groups planning his overthrow, going so far as to declare that a state of war existed between the two countries. A hastily convened conference in Tripoli sought to defuse the tensions between N’Djamena and Khartoum, which had also claimed that Chadians were supporting the Darfurian rebellion. The measures adopted last week in Libya are impossible to implement, even were there the political will to do so. Recent UN reports also cast doubt upon the neutrality of the Libyan authorities in the Darfur crisis, further complicating the issue.

 

Until now the international community has regarded the Darfur crisis as essentially a Sudanese problem, and has sought some kind of solution involving the application of the principles of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement reached between Khartoum and the SPLM in the south. The fragility of the Chadian pseudo-state is about to be tested by the westward thrust of the Darfurian crisis.

 

Richard Cornwell