Chadians worry rebels will continue fight
April 16, 2006 (N’DJAMENA) — As rumors circulated about when the rebels may strike again, Idriss Moumine lay in a tent outside Chad’s main hospital on Sunday, trying to ignore the searing heat and the relentless flies that hovered over the bandages where his legs were amputated.
Moumine has spent the last three days in a field hospital set up by Medicins Sans Frontiers following an attack by the rebel United Front for Change. He was wounded when he and two friends climbed inside an abandoned rebel pick up truck.
“We saw that the keys were in it, so we decided to try and drive it,” he said, his friend Haroun Chene laying in the cot next to him, one of his legs also missing. “We didn’t know at the time, but there was a bomb under the truck. When I put it into gear and when we began to roll, the car exploded.”
“I woke up on the ground and I saw my leg on the other side (of the street),” Moumine said.
Now, as he tries to cope with the loss of his legs in one of the world’s poorest country, Moumine also worries about yet another rebel attack.
“I think the future of N’djamena is not predictable, I know there are rebels even now in my own neighborhood and I am certain they will come back,” he said.
Despite a public rally to demonstrate his victory over Thursday’s pre-dawn raid, President Idriss Deby has not convinced most Chadians that the rebels are defeated. Rumors circulated through the capital that a rebel force was just 25 kilometers (15 miles) outside of the capital, N’djamena.
Deby’s government has tried its best to attract international attention to solve Chad’s political, economic and security problems.
On Friday, he said Chad was severing relations with neighboring Sudan, and threatened to expel 200,000 Sudanese refugees if the international community did not do more to stop what he claimed were Sudanese backed-rebels from destabilizing his government before the May 3 presidential election.
Oil Minister Mahmat Hassan Nasser said in an interview Saturday that the country’s oil pipeline would be shut down unless the international community ensured Chad received by midday Tuesday oil royalties frozen by the World Bank. Chad exports only 160,000 barrels per day.
In January, the World Bank froze an escrow account with US$125 million (A103.36 million) in oil royalties in London, Nasser said. It also cut US$124 million (A102.5 million) in financial assistance, after Chad changed an oil revenue law passed in 1999 as a condition for the World Bank’s support for the pipeline.
Henriette Blaah, a 46-year-old secretary in N’djamena, said she was very afraid of what the future may hold.
“We don’t know if the rebels will come back today or tomorrow,” she said. “I’ve been listening to the radio, and the rebels said they would come back, and I pray that they do not. We do not want this.”
But most people think the battled for Chad, which Deby has ruled for almost 16 years, is far from over.
Rebel commander Col. Regis Bechir told Radio France International Saturday that Deby’s regime was a menace that must be removed from power.
“Dialogue is the only way to save the people of Chad,” he said. “A national reconciliation, with a democratic basis, would be best. And we are determined to continue the armed struggle against the phony elections.”
Deby repeatedly has accused Sudan of hiring mercenaries to overthrow his government. Sudan has denied this and has long accused Chad of supporting fighters in its volatile Darfur region, where Arab militias and African rebels have fought for nearly three years. Some 180,000 people have died in Darfur.
The Sudanese government has denied any involvement with the Chadian rebels and Deby has taken a lead role in African Union efforts to negotiate a peace deal for Darfur.
Chad, an arid, landlocked country about three times the size of France, has been wracked by violence for most of its history, including more than 30 years of civil war since gaining independence from France in 1960 and various small-scale insurgencies since 1998.
(ST/AP)