The French army will remain in Chad, Emmanuel Macron’s envoy for Africa said Thursday in N’Djamena, expressing France’s “admiration” for the president and head of the junta in power since three years, General Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, for his transition process.
“We must stay and of course we will stay,” declared, before the only invited presidential press, Jean-Marie Bockel, “personal envoy” of the French president, responsible for discussing the new forms of the French military presence on the continent, that Paris intends to significantly reduce.
There are currently a thousand French soldiers in Chad. After a series of coups d’état in Mali, Burkina Faso and then Niger, the military juntas pushed out the French army, marking the end of a decade of anti-jihadist intervention in the Sahel.
“President Macron asked me to work” with N’Djamena “on an adaptation, an evolution of our system so as to better adapt it (…) to the military and security challenges of the region,” continued Mr. Bockel after an interview with General Déby.
The latter was proclaimed, at the head of a junta of 15 generals, president of Transition on April 20, 2021 upon the death of his father, Idriss Déby Itno, who ruled Chad with an iron fist for 30 years.
“It is not only the question of numbers, we must stay and of course we will stay,” insisted Mr. Bockel, in a speech broadcast on the website of the Chadian presidency.
“I expressed to the President of the Republic both our admiration for the process he has initiated within his country, also for Chad’s ability to face a certain number of threats at the same time thanks to armed forces engaged,” concluded the French envoy.
This declaration comes two months before a presidential election for which candidate Déby, 39, is a clear winner in the absence of serious rivals in an opposition which has either rallied to the junta or is violently repressed according to NGOs international human rights organizations.
But also eight days after the death, in an army assault against his party headquarters, of Mahamat Déby’s main political rival and cousin, Yaya Dillo Djérou.
His party accuses the soldiers, with supporting photos, of having “executed” him with a bullet in the head at close range and the rest of the opposition of having “assassinated” him to exclude him from the race to the presidency, which is denied by the government which accused him in particular of having led an attack against the powerful intelligence services.
“The circumstances of Yaya Dillo’s murder are unclear, but her violent death illustrates the dangers facing opposition politicians in Chad, particularly in the run-up to elections,” Human Rights Watch (HRW) wrote on Saturday ), which, like other international NGOs, regularly denounces the repression of any opposition or dissent.
SOURCE: AFP
