April 20 , 2021 | EASTERN PILOT Chad's President, Idriss Deby has died, an army spokesman said on Tuesday, Reuters reports. Details of ...
April 20 , 2021 | EASTERN PILOT
Chad's President, Idriss Deby has died, an army spokesman said on Tuesday, Reuters reports. Details of his death are still sketchy but the army authorities said he died from injuries sustained on the front. The Chadian army is currently combating rebel forces who have launched an assault on the capital, N’Djamena. His death came a few hours after he won a sixth term in office.
Chad's veteran president, Deby, won a sixth term, provisional election results showed on Monday, as the army said it had beaten back a column of insurgents advancing on the capital, N'Djamena. The 68-year-old Deby, who came to power in a rebellion in 1990, took 79.3% of the vote in the April 11 election, which was boycotted by top opposition leaders.
He was expected to give a victory speech to supporters, but his campaign director, Mahamat Zen Bada, said he had instead gone to visit Chadian soldiers on the front lines. "The candidate would have liked to have been here to celebrate ... but right now, he is alongside our valiant defence and security forces to fight the terrorists threatening our territory," Zen Bada told reporters.
The rebel group Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT), which is based across the northern frontier with Libya, attacked a border post on election day and then advanced hundreds of kilometres (miles) south. But it suffered a setback over the weekend. Chad's military spokesman, Azem Bermendao Agouna, told Reuters that army troops killed more than 300 insurgents and captured 150 on Saturday in Kanem province, around 300 km (185 miles) from N'Djamena.
In a swift development, the Chadian Army has announced Idriss Deby's 37-year-old son, Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno, a four-star general, as the new leader of the country.
Deby died on the battlefield after three decades in power, the army announced on state television on Tuesday. According to AFP, the army said Deby had been commanding his army at the weekend as it battled against rebels who had launched a major incursion into the north of the country on election day.
His latest election victory — with almost 80 percent of the vote — had never been in doubt, with a divided opposition, boycott calls, and a campaign in which demonstrations were banned or dispersed. Deby had campaigned on a promise of bringing peace and security to the region, but his pledges were undermined by the rebel incursion. The government had sought Monday to assure concerned residents that the offensive was over. There had been panic in some areas of N’Djamena on Monday after tanks were deployed along the city’s main roads, an AFP journalist reported.
The tanks were later withdrawn apart from a perimeter around the president’s office, which is under heavy security during normal times. “The establishment of a security deployment in certain areas of the capital seems to have been misunderstood,” government spokesman Cherif Mahamat Zene had said on Twitter on Monday.
“There is no particular threat to fear.”
However, the US embassy in N’Djamena had on Saturday ordered non-essential personnel to leave the country, warning of possible violence in the capital. Britain also urged its nationals to leave. France’s embassy said in an advisory to its nationals in Chad that the deployment was a precaution and there was no specific threat to the capital. The rebel raid in the provinces of Tibesti and Kanem was carried out by the Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT), based in Libya.
The group has a non-aggression pact with Khalifa Haftar, a military strongman who controls much of Libya’s east. FACT, a group mainly made up of the Saharan Goran people, said in a statement Sunday that it had “liberated” the Kanem region. Such claims in remote desert combat zones are difficult to verify. The Tibesti mountains near the Libyan frontier frequently see fighting between rebels and the army, as well as in the northeast bordering Sudan. French air strikes were needed to stop an incursion there in February 2019.
In February 2008, a rebel assault reached the gates of the presidential palace before being pushed back with French backing.
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