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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.
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/ 26 November 2007
Rebels and government soldiers fought gun battles in eastern Chad on Monday near the border with Sudan’s Darfur region after two rebel groups ended a month-long ceasefire on the weekend, a rebel leader said. Government officials confirmed there had been clashes in the area, but gave no information on casualties.
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/ 14 November 2007
A judge in Chad denied bail on Wednesday to six French charity workers at the centre of a child-abduction case that sparked violent anti-French protests in the capital, Ndjamena. The judge ruled that the defendants, along with three Chadians charged in the same case, should remain in custody.
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/ 8 November 2007
Chad will investigate reports that at least 74 Chadian children were flown to France more than a month-and-a-half ago without their parents’ knowledge, a senior judicial official said on Thursday. A network of local human rights groups wrote to the public prosecutor’s department with details about the 74 children.
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/ 6 November 2007
A Chadian judge was to question several Europeans on Tuesday who face kidnap and other charges for trying to fly 103 children, supposedly orphans from Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region, to France. Originally, 17 Europeans and four Chadians were arrested after the Zoe’s Ark charity tried to fly the children out of Chad.
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/ 4 November 2007
French President Nicolas Sarkozy flew seven freed Europeans out of Chad on Sunday but 10 others remained in jail charged with child abduction and fraud. The three French journalists and four Spanish flight attendants were among 16 French and Spanish nationals arrested as they tried to fly 103 African children to Europe.
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/ 1 November 2007
Most of the 103 African children who a French group had planned to fly out of Chad as orphans said they had families, which included at least one close relative, United Nations agencies said on Thursday. A joint report also said most of the 21 girls and 82 boys aged one to 10 years came from villages on the Chad-Sudan border.
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/ 31 October 2007
Chadians chanting ”No to the slave trade, no to child-trafficking” protested on Wednesday against a French group accused of trying to illegally fly children from the the country to Europe. Several hundred angry locals gathered outside the governor’s office in the town of Abeche, where nine French nationals and seven Spaniards were arrested last week.
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/ 31 October 2007
The scandal over a French group accused of trying to illegally fly African children from Chad to Europe will not affect the deployment of a European peace force in eastern Chad. France has troops stationed in Chad and will provide roughly half of a European Union peacekeeping force.
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/ 30 October 2007
Chadian authorities charged nine French nationals on Tuesday with abduction and fraud after they were detained trying to fly 103 African children to Europe to live with families, Chad’s government said. A Chadian prosecutor said the French faced five to 20 years of hard labour if convicted in the landlocked African country.
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/ 18 October 2007
An American humanitarian worker participating in an aid project was captured by Tubu rebels in Tibesti, northern Chad, rebels said on Thursday. ”The Movement for Democracy and Justice in Chad (MDJT) has detained an American aid worker … in the area controlled by the MDJT,” according to a statement obtained from a branch of the armed rebel group.
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/ 16 October 2007
Chad’s government on Tuesday slapped a state of emergency on three regions in the north and east of the Central African country after clashes between rival ethnic groups. The state of emergency was ordered for 12 days at a special Cabinet meeting, said a senior government official, who added that the aim was to allow the army to search and disarm insurgents.
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/ 15 October 2007
Twenty people were killed in ethnic clashes in east Chad after the desertion of former rebels loyal to the defence minister stoked tensions in the region bordering Sudan’s Darfur, government sources said on Monday. The violence between the Tama and Zaghawa communities broke out after an armed group of Tama fighters abandoned the eastern town of Guereda last week.
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/ 12 October 2007
Former Chadian rebels waiting to join the national army have left their eastern bases to make for the Sudanese border, their former chief told international French radio station RFI. ”They are unhappy for several reasons … These are fairly complex problems, fairly serious. I understand them,” he said.
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/ 7 September 2007
Chad will back United Nations moves to end the conflict in Sudan’s Darfur region by allowing international peacekeepers on its own soil and supporting peace talks, President Idriss Itno Déby said on Friday. Déby made the commitment to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who was in Chad on a regional tour to canvass support for the UN’s peacekeeping initiative for Darfur.
Thousands of children still figure among the ranks of the Chadian army and the government has done nothing to honour its promise to demobilise them. ”The Chadian government is failing on its promise to remove children from its armed forces,” said Peter Takirambudde, Human Rights Watch’s Africa director.
Chad’s government does not want a United Nations military peacekeeping force deployed in its violent east because it fears its neighbours may see these foreign troops as a threat, the prime minister said on Monday. A UN mission is in Chad to try to persuade the country to accept a robust UN military force.
Chad pledged on Wednesday to work to demobilise hundreds of child soldiers fighting in the ranks of the government army and rebel groups across the conflict-torn Central African country. President Idriss Déby Itno’s government made the commitment in an agreement signed with the United Nations children’s agency, Unicef.
Libyan leader Moammar Gadaffi sent an envoy to Sudan and Chad on Wednesday for talks aimed at easing tensions between the two countries after deadly border clashes. Abdel Salem Triki said he would deliver letters from Gadaffi calling on the leaders of the two countries to ”return to peace and dialogue”.
Chad said it routed a major rebel attack launched from Sudan on Monday to destabilise its government, but Khartoum accused Chad’s army of killing 17 of its troops and threatened a strong response. The accusations marked a deterioration in the volatile relations between the two neighbours, marred by violence spilling across the frontier of Sudan’s Darfur region.
Chadian civilians were killed and up to 8Â 000 driven from their homes when Sudanese Janjaweed militia attacked and destroyed two villages in eastern Chad on the weekend, Chad’s government said on Tuesday. A government statement said Chadian forces killed 25 of the attackers after the raids on Saturday.
Leaving the Chadian capital, Ndjamena, isn’t what it used to be. ”Thirty years ago, you’d still often come across herds of elephant crossing the highway at the southern exit of Ndjamena,” recalls Hassan Nago, a retired Agriculture Ministry official who lives in the village of Malo-Gaga, about 14km south-west of the capital.
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/ 17 February 2007
Under the blazing desert sun, the charred remains of the village of Bandala in eastern Chad lie scattered. Once home to hundreds of people, Bandala is now nothing more than scorched earth and broken pots, littered unceremoniously across the sand.
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/ 1 February 2007
Chadian rebels fighting to overthrow President Idriss Déby Itno on Thursday attacked the eastern border town of Adre on the main road route into Sudan’s Darfur region, the government and rebel spokespersons said. In recent months, several rebel groups have launched a spate of hit-and-run attacks against Chad government forces in the east.
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/ 24 January 2007
A man armed with a pistol hijacked a Sudanese airliner on Wednesday and tried to force it to fly to Britain, but it diverted to neighbouring Chad where he was arrested and the passengers released unharmed. Chadian officials said the hijacker, a young Sudanese man, said he was trying to escape persecution in his own country.
China has signed a series of loan, debt-relief and economic-cooperation agreements worth -million with Chad, less than six months after the oil-producing Central African country restored diplomatic ties with Beijing. Chad cut its ties with Taiwan in August, becoming the latest African country to switch allegiance to China.
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/ 26 December 2006
Chadian President Idriss Déby Itno and rebel leader Mahamat Nour Abdulkerim, once seen as a major threat to the government in N’Djamena, have signed a peace deal in Libya, a government source said on Monday. But the deal was not seen as the end of the threat to the rule of Déby from an array of rebel groups, as two of them forged an alliance.
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/ 19 December 2006
Nearly 40 people were killed in clashes between Chad’s security forces and armed raiders who attacked two eastern villages, the government said on Tuesday. Communications Minister Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor said the villages were attacked at the weekend by ”Janjaweed”, the term usually used to designate Arab militia raiders who operate from Sudan’s Darfur region.