Chad

VI

History

Cave paintings indicate that Chad was a fertile and populous country in ancient times. By the 9th century ad, the kingdom of Kanem (see Kanem-Bornu Empire) was established in what is now western Chad, with its capital at Njimi, near Mao. Its rulers adopted Islam in the 11th century. Kanem was subjected to neighboring Bornu in the 16th century, and in the succeeding period the chief powers were the sultanates of Baguirmi and Wadai in the south. The export of slaves to North Africa was an important sector of the economy of these states.

In the late 19th century the area was subdued by the Sudanese conqueror Rabih al-Zubayr, and it was taken over by the French on his death. In 1910 Chad became a part of the French Equatorial Federation, with headquarters in Brazzaville, the Republic of the Congo, about 2,400 km (about 1,500 mi) away. The change to colonial status resulted in little interference in the way of life of the indigenous peoples and little development beyond the establishment of cotton plantations in the south.

In 1960 Chad, like other French colonies in Africa, became independent. Desperately poor, the governments of President François Tombalbaye, a southerner, were supported by French aid. The dissatisfaction of northern Muslims first surfaced in 1963 and forced some changes in the Bantu-dominated one-party government. This, however, was not enough to satisfy them, and in 1969 Muslim guerrillas began to operate in the north. With support from neighboring Libya, their attacks escalated during the following years. Despite military aid from France, Tombalbaye’s situation was made totally untenable by the drought of the early 1970s. He was assassinated in 1975.

Tombalbaye’s successor, General Félix Malloum, was not able to end the civil strife. By 1979 the war had engulfed the south, Malloum was overthrown, and a northerner, Goukouni Oueddei, emerged as president. In 1980 Libya intervened to support Oueddei against rebels under former defense minister Hissène Habré, who was backed by Sudan and Egypt. After the Libyan forces withdrew late in 1981 at Oueddei’s request, Habré renewed his offensive, and his troops captured N’Djamena in June 1982. In 1983 the ousted Oueddei formed a rival government in the north. In the continued civil strife, Oueddei had the backing of Libyan troops, while France sent troops and supplies to keep Habré in power. By the end of 1988, Libyan forces had been driven out of Chad, and the two nations had normalized diplomatic relations. In December 1990, however, Habré was ousted by an insurgent group, the Patriotic Salvation Movement, which had Libyan support. The rebel leader, General Idriss Deby, then assumed the presidency. In January 1992 the Deby government claimed to have crushed a rebellion by forces loyal to Habré, and France sent more troops as a safeguard. In the early 1990s Chad continued to suffer from widespread political and ethnic unrest, including the massacre of 82 civilians by President Deby’s private guard in August 1993.

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In 1994, however, the government reached a cease-fire agreement with the rebel group Comité de Sursaut National pour la Paix et la Démocratie (CSNPD); the CSNPD committed to withdraw troops from southern Chad, and the government agreed to appoint members of the CSNPD to the national army. In addition, a 20-year territorial dispute with Libya came to an end when the International Court of Justice ruled that Chad had sovereignty over the Aozou Strip, a stretch of land along the Libyan border covering about 115,000 sq km (45,000 sq mi). In June and July 1996, under a new, democratic constitution, Deby was popularly elected president in the nation’s first presidential elections. Deby was reelected in 2001 and again in 2006.

Throughout the early 21st century Chad was linked with unrest in the neighboring Darfur region of Sudan. The unrest began with Chad’s civil war in the 1980s, which spilled over into Darfur. A Chadian warlord militia sponsored by Libya retreated into Darfur at the end of the decade, after the Chadians drove Libyan forces out of Chad. This Chadian militia formed an alliance with Darfuri Arabs who were impoverished by a severe drought. A shortage of water and arable land had led to increasing conflict between the nomadic Arabs, who used the land for grazing livestock, and the settled non-Arabs, who used it primarily for farming. The well-armed Arab alliance, which became known as Janjaweed (or Jingaweit), launched attacks and raids on farming communities. Those communities developed militias of their own in response.

From 1999 to 2002 three events combined to spark a wider war. First, a split in Sudan’s ruling National Congress Party saw many Darfuris going into opposition. Second, the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA), a rebel group that had been fighting a war against the government in southern Sudan since 1983, dispatched arms and military advisers to non-Arab rebels in Darfur, helping them mount an effective insurgency. Third, Chadian army officers began clandestinely assisting this Darfur insurgency.

In 2003 Chad attempted to help mediate the conflict, and cease-fire agreements were reached in 2003 and 2004. However, they were soon disregarded. A crackdown on the Darfur rebellion by the Sudanese government, working in alliance with the Janjaweed, led to a significant refugee problem in Chad. By 2008 there were about 260,000 Darfuri refugees in eastern Chad, and cross-border fighting had made refugees of about 180,000 Chadians, who were driven from their homes. That same year the European Union (EU), spearheaded by France, the former colonial power in Chad, committed thousands of troops to Chad to help protect the refugee population. In 2009 the United Nations assumed control of this force.

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