French military plane comes under rebel fire in Chad

Oct 24, 2006 (PARIS) — The French military Tuesday said a ground-to-air missile was unsuccessfully fired at a reconnaissance plane in eastern Chad, where rebels hostile to the N’Djamena regime claimed the attempted attack was a mistake.

In an interview with the French RFI radio station, Chadian rebel leader General Mahamat Nouri said the rebels fired the missile Monday because they thought the plane was attacking them.

“We fired a missile” after the French plane had made “several passes above the rebels”, said Nouri, the head of the Union of Forces for Democracy and Development (UFDD).

While it appeared the French plane had not attacked, “the guys thought the plane had fired, so they fired” the missile, he said.

When questioned by the radio, Nouri, who had earlier denied any involvement by his forces, admitted the attack was a mistake.

The French military had announced that the sensors of a reconnaissance plane in Chad had “detected a missile being fired on Monday morning,” a spokesman for the armed forces chief of staff in Paris said.

Though the French plane, a Breguet Atlantique 2, was not endangered by the missile, the army was treating it as hostile fire since no other aircraft was in the sector at the time, Major Cristophe Prazuck said.

Rebels hostile to Paris-backed Chadian President Idriss Deby Itno are operating in the east of the former French colony, near the border with Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region.

After a period of relative calm attributed to the rainy season, violence between UFDD rebels and the army resumed last month and the rebels claimed in recent days to have briefly seized control of two key towns.

African Union Commission chief Alpha Oumar Konare called for an immediate halt to the rebel military operations against N’Djamena.

In a statement, Konare also “exhorted Chadian parties not to resort to force and to use dialogue to resolve their differences respecting constitutional law.”

The French army did not detect the exact missile type but believes it may have been a shoulder-fired SAM-7, based on the weaponry being used in the Chadian conflict, Prazuck said.

No specific retaliatory measures have been taken, but the authorities remain on alert faced with the “highly unstable” situation, he said.

France has more than 1,000 troops stationed in the central African country, as well as a fleet of Mirage F-1 fighter jets and the Breguet reconnaissance plane.

The spokesman said the French mission would continue unchanged despite the missile incident.

The French forces are officially there to provide the Chadian authorities with logistical and intelligence support and do not take part in combat missions, according to the French defence ministry.

Chadian rebels have denounced the French reconnaissance flights over their positions, accusing Paris of propping up a “despotic” regime — while N’Djamena accuses Khartoum of backing the rebellion.

In April, a rebel column managed to reach N’Djamena but was repelled by the president’s forces. Paris had provided vital intelligence to the Chadian forces and on one occasion fired a warning shot at an advancing rebel line.
The French foreign ministry said it was closely following developments in the country.

Foreign ministry spokesman Jean-Baptiste Mattei said France “remains highly attached to the stability of Chad, whose location in central Africa is a mooring point for the broader stability of the continent.”

“France calls on Chad and Sudan to respect the security provisions of the N’Djamena accord,” under which they agreed in July to settle their differences through diplomacy and not to attempt to destabilise each other, he said.

(AFP)