General Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, head of a military junta for three years in Chad, is sworn in Thursday as president elected on May 6 in a vote contested by the opposition.
His election, deemed not very “credible” by international NGOs, with 61% of the vote, puts an end to a transition at the start of which he was proclaimed, on April 20, 2021, as head of state by a military junta in the death of his father Idriss Déby Itno. Marshal Déby had just been killed by rebels on his way to the front, after having ruled Chad with an iron fist for more than 30 years.
“Deby Dynasty”
The inauguration of this 40-year-old general in N’Djamena also marks the end of a transition marked by fierce repression, sometimes bloody, of an opposition which calls for an end to the “Déby dynasty”.
The former opponent Succès Masra, whom Mahamat Déby had appointed Prime Minister four months ago, had believed – or claimed to believe – to create an illusion with a rival candidacy described as “false pretense” by the rest of the opposition, which accused of wanting to give a “democratic veneer” to a “predicted ballot”.
Mr. Masra, also 40 years old, only received 18.54% of the votes, but claimed victory, before playing appeasement after the rejection of his appeal by the Constitutional Council on May 16 and calling on his supporters to “continue the political fight (…) peacefully”.
Adoubé
He finally presented his resignation on Wednesday, “in accordance” with what “the Constitution” provides after the election of a new president.
The inauguration ceremony of the strong man of Chad will be an opportunity, by gauging the number of heads of state present, to see if the international community still supports the one it had dubbed without hesitation in 2021, while it vilified and sanctioned putschist soldiers everywhere else in Africa.
We do not yet know the names of the heads of state who will be present but French President Emmanuel Macron, the only Westerner to have made the trip to N’Djamena in 2021 for a tribute to the late Marshal Déby in front of his successor son, dispatches his delegate minister responsible in particular for Foreign Trade and Francophonie, Franck Riester, to the inauguration, according to Paris.
Mr. Macron is also one of the rare Western leaders to have congratulated Mahamat Déby on his election.
Chad, one of the poorest countries in the world, is considered, thanks to its powerful army, as the regional pillar of the war against jihadists in the Sahel. Paris maintains a thousand of its soldiers there, elsewhere expelled from Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger for the benefit of Russia and its paramilitaries or mercenaries.
On Wednesday, observers will scrutinize the level of representation of the Moscow delegation, Russian President Vladimir Putin having been one of the very first to congratulate his Chadian counterpart on his election.
“Not democratic”
In tune with the opposition which called for a boycott, international NGOs, like the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), castigated an election that was “neither credible, nor free, nor democratic”, “in a deleterious context marked by (…) the multiplication of human rights violations”.
The junta has violently repressed all opposition for three years and had excluded General Déby’s most dangerous rivals from the vote, in a country marked, since its independence from France in 1960, by coups d’état, authoritarian regimes and the regular assaults of a multitude of rebellions.
On October 20, 2022, at least 300 young people demonstrating against the maintenance of the junta were shot and killed by the military and police, according to national and international NGOs. About fifty recognized the power. And more than a thousand deported for a month in a sinister penal colony in the middle of the desert, some of whom were “executed” on the way or tortured, according to the same NGOs and the opposition.
Two months before the election, Yaya Dillo, cousin of Mahamat Déby and his fiercest rival for the presidential election, was killed by soldiers in the assault on his party headquarters. “Assassinated” with a “point-blank bullet to the head”, according to his party. Western countries and NGOs have since called in vain for an independent investigation.
