Chad’s Higher Judicial Council gave him the go-ahead on Friday to pardon six French aid workers jailed for eight years for abducting children, an official said. The six members of the Zoe’s Ark charity were sentenced to eight years’ hard labour by Chad last year for trying to kidnap 103 African children.
Chad and the United Nations Children’s Fund began on Friday to send home 103 African children that a French charity had sought to fly to France in October for adoption, authorities said. Eighty-three children were the first to leave an orphanage in Abeche, eastern Chad, on Friday in two buses.
When rebels entered Chad’s capital, Ndjamena, I was told to get there as quickly as possible. Half a week later, at the end of a 2 000km chase across Central Africa by bus, train and taxi, the lofty promises of increased transport investment intoned at countless African summits rang very hollow in my head.
The sun-blasted desert between this small Chadian border town and Sudan’s Darfur is scattered with stunted trees and thorny shrubs. Beneath each one, Sudanese refugees huddle under blankets or sheets tied to branches, desperately seeking shade.
Sudanese authorities have found a body that they believe is that of a French European Union soldier missing after a clash near the Chadian border on Monday, a spokesperson for the EU military force in Chad said. ”The arrangements for the formal identification and recovery of the remains are being organised,” Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Poulain said on Wednesday.
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/ 29 February 2008
Chad extended a state of emergency by a further 15 days on Friday, saying it was needed to maintain state authority almost a month after a rebel attack on the capital, Ndjamena. The state of emergency gives the government wide search-and-arrest powers and also permits control of media reporting.
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/ 15 February 2008
A state of emergency declared in Chad will do little to calm nerves among residents in the capital, Ndjamena, many of whom complain soldiers are already taking advantage of a security crackdown to loot homes. President Idriss Déby Itno declared a state of emergency across the former French colony late on Thursday.
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/ 11 February 2008
Chad said on Monday it would not accept any more refugees from Sudan’s Darfur region and would expel them unless the international community sent them back home or found another country to shelter them. Prime Minister Nouradine Delwa Kassire Coumakoye gave the warning as thousands of fresh Sudanese refugees crossed Chad’s eastern border.
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/ 11 February 2008
Chadian rebels fled south on Sunday pursued by government forces, the military said, as the United Nations refugee agency warned that recent fighting in the country had put aid agencies in danger. Although a calm returned to the capital Ndjamena a week after a bloody assault on the city which left more than 160 people dead, the rebel forces said they were heading south.
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/ 10 February 2008
Chad’s rebels said on Saturday they controlled the centre of the landlocked country and would hold their position in an effort to lure government troops from the capital into an open battle in the desert. A spokesperson for the rebels said they occupied the towns of Mongo and Bitkine in rugged central Chad, about 500km from the capital.
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/ 8 February 2008
Residents of Chad’s curfew-bound capital, Ndjamena, did their best on Friday to resume normal life amid the ruins of a rebel attack and mounting protests over arbitrary arrests and alleged summary executions. The Chadian army said the rebels who were driven back from Ndjamena had withdrawn to Mongo, 400km east of the city.
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/ 7 February 2008
Chad President Idriss Déby Itno called on the European Union on Thursday to deploy a peacekeeping force urgently to the east, as his government sought to tighten security after a weekend rebel assault. Prime Minister Nouradine Delwa Kassire Coumakoye announced a dusk-to-dawn curfew across the capital, Ndjamena.
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/ 6 February 2008
Chad’s government is in total control of the country after beating off a rebel offensive, President Idriss Déby Itno said on Wednesday. Making his first public appearance since rebels attacked the capital, Ndjamena, on the weekend, Déby accused the president of neighbouring Sudan of backing the rebel offensive.
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/ 6 February 2008
Chadian rebels said on Wednesday they would defend themselves if attacked by French troops or other foreign forces in Chad, and vowed to press ahead with their fight to topple President Idriss Déby Itno. They said they were still occupying positions ”around Ndjamena”, but declined to specify how far they were from the capital.
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/ 4 February 2008
Thousands of civilians fled Chad’s capital Ndjamena on Monday after rebel forces pulled back from a two-day assault, but the rebels said they would attack again to try to topple President Idriss Déby Itno, whose government said it had beaten off more than 2 000 insurgents.
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/ 3 February 2008
Fierce fighting with tanks and helicopter strikes rocked the capital of Chad for a second day on Sunday as rebels surrounded President Idriss Déby Itno in his palace and hundreds of foreigners fled the country. International aid organisations reported bodies in the streets and hundreds of people wounded.
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/ 3 February 2008
Fighting restarted on Sunday around the presidential palace in the Chadian capital, Ndjamena, where rebel forces have surrounded President Idriss Déby Itno and loyalist troops, residents said. This is despite an earlier report that the main leader of the rebels had accepted a ceasefire proposed by Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi.
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/ 2 February 2008
Rebels seized Chad’s capital, Ndjamena, on Saturday after intense fighting with government forces, military and rebel sources said, as President Idriss Déby Itno remained holed up in the presidential palace. ”The whole of the city is in the hands of the rebels. It’s down to mopping-up operations,” said a military source.
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/ 2 February 2008
Fighting broke out between Chadian rebels and government forces just north of the capital on Saturday, both sides said, as France prepared to evacuate its nationals in the face of the rebel advance. ”Fighting between government forces and rebels has started at about 20km north of Ndjamena,” a military source said.
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/ 1 February 2008
Chad’s army fought to hold off advancing rebels 100km from the capital, Ndjamena, on Friday as the renewed combat delayed the deployment of European peacekeepers to the Central African country. Up to 3 700 European Union troops were due to arrive in coming weeks on an urgent peacekeeping mission to eastern Chad.
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/ 1 February 2008
Chadian rebels said on Friday that their forces had taken up positions around the capital, Ndjamena, and they called on President Idriss Déby Itno to negotiate a power-sharing deal or face an offensive on the city. Residents in the dusty capital on the banks of the Chari River said the atmosphere was tense.
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/ 31 January 2008
A Sudanese-backed Chadian rebel column has advanced deep into Chad towards the capital, Ndjamena, in the west, the government said in a statement broadcast by state media on Thursday. A separate security source in Ndjamena said the column of about 300 vehicles had passed through the town of Ati and halted 250km east of Ndjamena.
Chadian President Idriss Déby Itno on Saturday threatened to pursue and strike Chadian rebels inside neighbouring Sudan and repeated charges that Khartoum was trying to destabilise his country. Déby claimed his forces had already driven out the rebels from Chad and said: ”We’re going to destroy them in their nest inside Sudan.”
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/ 28 December 2007
Six French aid workers sentenced to hard labour in Chad for trying to kidnap 103 children flew out of the African nation on Friday bound for France where they are due to serve their sentences in jail. France invoked a 1976 judicial cooperation treaty with its former colony to obtain the quick transfer home of the six.
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/ 28 December 2007
Six French aid workers sentenced to hard labour in Chad for trying to kidnap 103 children will be returned to France on Friday under an accord between the two states, a Chad Justice Ministry official said. France had asked Chad to send home the four men and two women from French humanitarian group Zoe’s Ark.
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/ 27 December 2007
Six French aid workers were sentenced to eight years of hard labour each after a court in Chad found them guilty on Wednesday of trying to kidnap 103 children from the African country. The court in the capital N’Djamena handed down its sentence on the fourth day of the trial of six members of the French humanitarian group Zoe’s Ark.
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/ 21 December 2007
Six French aid workers on trial on kidnapping charges in Chad were trying to save children they believed to be Darfur orphans, and therefore are protected by international law from any charges, their lawyers said on Friday moments before the trial began.
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/ 10 December 2007
Six French members of the Zoe’s Ark charity, three Chadians and a Sudanese national will be tried by a criminal court in Chad for having tried to fly 103 African children to France, a lawyer said on Monday. A Chadian investigating judge dismissed the case against 12 other suspects.
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/ 6 December 2007
Charred bodies and burnt-out trucks still lie on the blackened grass in a valley in eastern Chad two days after the fighting moved further north. Columns of smoke rise up and drift across the smouldering plains beneath Tourka Mountain, a rocky outcrop near the border with Sudan’s Darfur region.
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/ 29 November 2007
Fresh clashes between Chad’s government army and rebels broke out on Thursday near the eastern border with Sudan, three days after a major battle that shattered a month-old peace accord, army and rebel sources said. Monday’s battle was the heaviest in months in eastern Chad.
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/ 28 November 2007
Chadian rebels warned a European Union peacekeeping force bound for eastern Chad on Wednesday not to side with President Idriss Déby Itno, saying they would fight it as a foreign occupation army if it did so. The warning from the rebel Assembly of Forces for Change followed the biggest battle in months in eastern Chad.
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/ 27 November 2007
Soldiers and rebels have both claimed to have killed several hundred of their opponents in combat on Monday in eastern Chad. The battles at Abougouleigne left ”several hundred [rebels] dead, several injured and several prisoners of war”, according to the statement from the army’s general staff.