Chad digs trench round capital to foil rebel raids

March 3, 2008 (N’DJAMENA) — Chad’s government is digging a 3-metre deep trench around the capital to prevent a repeat of last month’s attack, when rebels in pickup trucks rolled into N’Djamena and fought two days of heavy battles.

The ditch will all but encircle the dusty city, slicing through neighbourhoods, cutting off a network of sandy tracks and forcing vehicles to pass through one of a handful of fortified gateways, a security source said.

The Feb. 2-3 attack was the worst in several years of armed rebellion against President Idriss Deby, concentrated mainly in the unstable east near the border with Sudan’s war-torn Darfur.

After a week-long advance across Chad’s vast, arid interior, a rebel column of 200 or 300 pickups battled government troops outside N’Djamena and entered the city, triggering fighting that Deby says killed at least 400 civilians.

Initial fears that the rebels would simply regroup and attack afresh proved unfounded. But the threat of attack remains — eastern rebels launched another bloody offensive on N’Djamena in 2006 — and work began on the trench two weeks ago.

Government officials, at least in public, are being coy.

“It’s part of a military secret. It’s part of our strategy and I cannot tell you this,” Interior Minister Ahmat Mahamat Bachir told Reuters when asked what the trench was for.

The blanket of secrecy has increased residents’ nervousness under a state of emergency that human rights campaigners and residents say has been used to seize property and arrest those suspected of opposing Deby’s rule.

“Be careful, the military are patrolling here and you might be arrested,” one of a group of young man on motorcycles told a Reuters reporter in the outlying neighbourhood of Diguel, which the trench has cut in two.

Last week the government renewed the state of emergency, saying it needed the special powers to complete urgent repairs to the many public buildings burned or damaged in the fighting and violent looting that followed.

Rocket propelled grenades and canon fire snapped off many of the avenues of trees that line central N’Djamena, which was laid out under French colonial rule.

Even those that escaped are now being felled; local people say rebels used fallen trees to block roads during the fighting.

“It’s true that we will lose the shade,” said peanut seller Hawa, one of the many hawkers who work the main boulevards.

“Maybe the government will do something else for us, but I don’t think so,” she said, sheltering beneath a scarf from the fierce sun in the 40 degree Celsius (104 Fahrenheit) heat.

For some in the city, life may never be the same again.

In Diguel, an elderly man riding a bicycle said the neat trench, despite being barely 1 metre wide here, had stopped him visiting relatives on the other side.

“You are young and can try to jump over, but I won’t be able to get to the other side,” he said, gazing up and down the trench stretching into the distance before turning home.

(Reuters)