Prayers for Africa

“Where you go I will go, and where you stay I will stay. Your people will be my people and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there I will be buried. May the LORD deal with me, be it ever so severely, if anything but death separates you and me." Ruth 1:16 & 17

My husbands country is now my country but the fragility of the situation becomes even more real when yesterday we put my father-in-law on a plane headed back to Chad after reading the following articles. Our prayers are with Abel and all the family.

UN Integrated Regional Information Networks
November 15, 2005 Posted to the web November 15, 2005
Ndjamena
Chadian authorities on Tuesday insisted they had the situation under control a day after attacks on military camps in and outside the capital, N'djamena, that left at least two of the gunmen dead and 15 under arrest.
"The city is calm. People have returned to work as normal," Communications Minister Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor told IRIN from the capital.
In the early hours of Monday, a score of armed men in civilian dress attacked an army training centre about 25 kilometres south of N'djamena, while a dozen assailants staged an attack against the National Guard and Nomad Camp in the capital, the government announced Monday evening.
In the attack outside N'djamena government forces killed two men and detained four. "The rest were able to flee with some arms," the 14 November communique said.
Describing the attack in N'djamena, the communique said: "Twelve men, with the complicity of the national guard, tried to break into an arms depot and the chief of staff's office."
The government said it has been monitoring a group of would-be insurgents for some time.
"A network for recruiting combatants in N'djamena and in the south has been identified and has been monitored for several weeks," the statement said, adding that some involved are "well-known" by government security and information officials.
Doumgor said an investigation into Monday's attacks was underway.
Tensions have been high in Chad since scores of soldiers deserted their posts in N'djamena last month and fled east.
And days after the desertions, President Idriss Deby dissolved his presidential guard in a move some analysts said signalled a desperate bid to save his administration.
Deby - who seized power in a 1990 coup and was elected in 1996 and 2001 - has long faced dissension in the ranks of the armed forces.
The deserters now based in the east - who call themselves the Platform for National Change, Unity and Democracy (SCUD) - claim they number at least 700 and are demanding Deby's departure before they will enter into negotiations with the government.
Their self-proclaimed leader Yaya Dillo Djerou told IRIN on Tuesday that SCUD was not linked to Monday's attacks in and around the capital.
"We have no contact at all with them. These are not our soldiers," he said in a telephone interview.
In its statement, the government called Monday's attacks "a desperate and very limited act."
"The situation is totally under control," it added.
In past incidents of tension within the army, dissident soldiers in May 2004 staged a rebellion in N'djamena that was put down by loyalist forces. The mutineers, most of then from the Zaghawa people like Deby, said Chad was not doing enough to back the largely-Zaghawa rebels fighting the Sudanese government and allied militia in Darfur.
Last year, Deby accused neighbouring Sudan of backing a 3,000-strong rebel force operating at the border.
But Djerou, who is Zaghawa, told IRIN in a recent interview that ethnic questions played no part in the dissension within the army. He said the deserters were not linked to the Darfur rebel movements.

Senegal: Ex-Dictator of Chad Arrested
Human Rights Watch (Washington, DC)
PRESS RELEASENovember 15, 2005 Posted to the web November 16, 2005
Dakar
Senegal today arrested the former Chadian dictator, Hissène Habré, on an international arrest warrant from Belgium for atrocities committed during his eight-year rule. The Senegalese government must now fulfill its international legal obligations to extradite Habré to face trial in Belgium, Human Rights Watch said.
This morning, Habré was arrested, taken to jail, then brought before a prosecutor to be questioned and then transferred to the penitentiary wing of a hospital in the Senegalese capital Dakar, where he has lived in exile since 1990. On September 19, a Belgian judge issued an international arrest warrant for Habré under Belgium's "universal jurisdiction" law, which allowed prosecution of the worst atrocities no matter where they were committed.
"Habré has been running away from his crimes and from his victims for fifteen years. Seeing him arrested and put in jail today, it looks like justice is finally catching up to him," said Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch, who coordinates the international efforts of the Chadian victim plaintiffs, and was at the courthouse in Dakar. "But Habré's arrest is just the first step. It's now up to Senegal to live up to its treaty obligations and extradite Habré to Belgium where he can answer the charges against him in a fair trial."
Extradition procedures in Senegal impose a series of tight deadlines following the arrest of a suspect. Within eight days, Habré must appear before the Indicting Chamber of the Court of Appeals in Dakar. If the court renders a favorable decision on the extradition request, Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade will have one month to sign the extradition decree.
Habré took power in the former French colony of Chad in 1982 until 1990, when he was overthrown by the current president, Idriss Déby, and fled to Senegal. His rule was marked by permanent terror, serious human rights violations and widespread campaigns of violence against his own people. In 1992, the Chadian Ministry of Justice's Commission of Inquiry established by his successor accused Habré's government of 40,000 political killings and systematic torture.The United States and France supported Habré, seeing him as a bulwark against Libya's Mohamar el-Qaddafi. Under President Ronald Reagan, the United States gave covert CIA paramilitary support to help Habré take power.