General Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, head of the military junta for three years in Chad before being elected President in a vote boycotted by the opposition, was sworn in on Thursday for a five-year mandate, renewable once.
His presidential election on May 6, with officially 61% of the vote, puts an end to a transition period at the start of which he was proclaimed, on April 20, 2021, as head of state by a military junta at the head of state. death of his father Idriss Déby Itno. The marshal 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.
“We, Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno (…), swear before the Chadian people and on our honor (…) to fulfill the high functions that the Nation has entrusted to us,” swore the head of state, dressed in his traditional white boubou, in front of members of the Constitutional Council and hundreds of guests at the Palace of Arts and Culture in N’Djamena.
After having praised in a speech the “return to constitutional order”, he promised to be “the President of Chadians from all backgrounds and all sensitivities”.
“Deby Dynasty”
The election of this 40-year-old general, in a vote deemed not very “credible” by international NGOs, also marks the end of a transition marked by fierce repression, sometimes bloody, of an opposition which calls for end to 34 years of “Déby dynasty”.
The former opponent Succès Masra, whom Déby had appointed Prime Minister four months ago, had believed – or claimed to believe – to create an illusion with a rival candidacy described by the opposition as a “democratic veneer” in a “ballot played with advance”.
He only received 18.54% of the votes officially, but claimed victory. Before playing appeasement by calling on his supporters to “continue the political fight (…) peacefully”. Masra submitted his resignation on Wednesday and was absent from the inauguration.
Adoubé
The ceremony was also 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 fuss in 2021, while it vilified and sanctioned everywhere else in Africa the military putschists. In the end eight heads of state, all African, made the trip to N’Djamena. Some others sent ministers, the rest their ambassadors.
The Frenchman Emmanuel Macron, one of the rare Western heads of state to have publicly “congratulated” Mr. Déby on his election, sent to the inauguration his minister delegate responsible in particular for Foreign Trade and Francophonie, Franck Riester.
Chad, one of the poorest countries in the world, is considered 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.
Russian President Vladimir Putin was one of the very first heads of state to congratulate Mahamat Déby 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.
