Rebel Forces Roll Into Chad’s Capital, Battle For Control
Government Accuses Sudan Of Arming the Attackers
By Stephanie McCrummen and Robin Wright
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 3, 2008; A17
NAIROBI, Feb. 2 — After a three-day advance across the desert, hundreds of rebels fought their way into the capital of the oil-rich nation of Chad on Saturday, and as night fell, it remained unclear whether the government or the rebels were in control.
Rebel trucks rolled through the streets of the capital, N’Djamena, and residents shut themselves indoors as gunfire echoed through the city, witnesses said.
A spokesman for the rebels, Abderamane Koullamalah, told Radio France International that they had offered to coordinate the departure of President Idriss D¿by*
with the African Union to “avoid a pointless bloodbath.”
But the Chadian ambassador to Ethiopia, Cherif Mahamat Zene, insisted that the government remained in control. He said D¿by(?) and his cabinet were “fine” and repeated a long-standing accusation that neighboring Sudan was supplying the rebels with weapons.
The rebels had advanced from the direction of the Sudanese border.
“Sudan is the one behind this attack,” Zene said from the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack condemned the coup attempt and said the rebels had entered “from outside the country,” a clear reference to Sudan. “We call for calm in the capital and support the African Union’s call for an immediate end to armed attacks and to refrain from violence that might harm innocent civilians,” he said.
U.S. officials said that the city had not fallen to the rebels but that the fighting was intense.
“The situation remains too unsettled to project the outcome,” said Greg Garland, the State Department’s spokesman for Africa. “We continue to monitor conditions closely.”
The government of Chad, a former French colony with a population of almost 10 million and a newly booming oil industry, has in recent years battled a variety of rebel groups along its volatile eastern border with Sudan, forcing an estimated 170,000 Chadians to flee their homes for sprawling camps in the scrubby desert.
The rebel groups, one of which is led by D¿by’s (?) nephew, accuse the president of corruption but appear to be driven more by opportunism than ideology, according to analysts. They have shifted alliances and fought one other from time to time, often losing favor with the local populations they have displaced.
But D¿by(?), who came to power in a 1990 coup and owns several lavish palaces in the capital, is also highly unpopular among Chadians, who believe he has stolen the country’s oil wealth, estimated at more than $200 million annually. Instead of using the money to fund desperately needed schools, health clinics and roads, (?)D¿by has bought guns, attack helicopters and armored cars for his own protection.
The rebels rolled toward the capital in a convoy of about 300 trucks, battling government forces on the eastern and northern outskirts of the capital and later near the presidential palace, European officials said.
An American aid worker who was unable to leave a hotel near the palace because of the fighting, wrote on the Web site of his organization, Stop Genocide Now, that he and his colleagues were sneaking back and forth to the hotel’s third-floor windows to “get a glimpse of anything, something, usually just black smoke coming from the Presidential palace.”
“Nobody really knows what is happening,” Gabriel Stauring, 41, wrote. “We go through some quiet minutes, and it feels close to normal, but then, consistently, we get big bangs and non-stop gunfire. . . . As I write this, a shell hit way too close to us, the kind of bang you feel on your skin.”
By Saturday night, he wrote, bullets were flying and walls and objects were falling on top of him and about 50 other people huddled in the hotel’s dining room. Outside, a few French soldiers fought off gunmen who were also trying to take over the state-controlled radio station and a nearby hotel.
“We can only guess as to the extent of destruction around the city; there was almost nonstop heavy shooting, artillery, helicopter fire,” he wrote later in an e-mail to The Washington Post.
Libya’s official news agency, JANA, reported that rebel leader Mahamat Nouri agreed to a cease-fire Saturday night after speaking to Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, who was appointed by the African Union to mediate, according to the Associated Press. The report could not be confirmed.
The State Department urged all American citizens to leave Chad and authorized the departure of non-emergency U.S. government employees because of the rebel advance, said Karl Duckworth, a department spokesman. About 500 Americans are estimated to be living in or visiting Chad.
France, which has 1,400 troops stationed in Chad and is widely seen as D¿by’s most powerful backer, condemned the rebel attack and called for reconciliation. French troops were not engaged in fighting the rebels, however, and remained focused on efforts to evacuate French and other European citizens.
The attack on N’Djamena delayed the deployment of 3,700 European Union troops to eastern Chad, where they were to help protect displaced Chadians and an estimated 230,000 Sudanese refugees who have fled the conflict in the Darfur region of western Sudan.
According to analysts, the rebels believed the presence of the E.U. troops would curtail their own military plans, and European officials said Saturday that the rebel attack had been deliberately timed to thwart the troop deployment.
“This is no coincidence,” a French official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the crisis.
Wright reported from Washington. Special correspondent Kassahun Addis in Addis Ababa contributed to this report.
* Lieutenant General Idriss Déby Itno (born 1952) is the President of Chad and the head of the Patriotic Salvation Movement.
Idriss Deby at wikipedia
