A year after the deadly repression of a demonstration against military power in Chad, the opposition is still the target of arrests, intimidation and threats, two months before a constitutional referendum supposed to open the way to “free” elections. .

Young people tear down the walls in the Abena district of N’Djamena, home to the headquarters of the Transformers, the main opposition party, and where most of the demonstrators left on October 20, 2022. The building appears brand new, reports a correspondent from AFP ten days after 72 young activists, some of whom were renovating it, were brutally rounded up and held incommunicado ever since.

While, usually, police and soldiers are conspicuously stationed nearby, no uniforms are visible. But no one wants to talk to the press. “We, the demonstrators of October 20, live in fear of being arrested or kidnapped,” Djimrangar Ngueto, 31, president of the Association for the Defense of the Interests of the Victims of October 20, explains by telephone to AFP. (ADIV 20).

He is the only one who speaks, hoping to be protected by his status as standard bearer for the victims of “Black Thursday”. Arrested like hundreds of others, he was released after six months in prison following a pardon from the president citing an “outstretched hand”. “Nothing has changed in a year, the government has even hardened the hand it claimed to extend,” says Djimrangar.

Gigantic raids

Any gathering is systematically prohibited. “All this is done in anticipation of unrest before, during and after the referendum”, because “the army is divided, with a part in opposition”, analyzes Evariste Ngarlem Toldé, professor of political science at the university, on the telephone. from N’Djamena. The all-powerful presidential guard “will not hesitate to shoot and there is a risk that part of the army will confront it if there are many deaths,” he fears.

Two and a half years ago, on April 20, 2021, the young general Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno was proclaimed by the army transitional president at the head of a junta, after the death of his father, Idriss Déby Itno, who led the country with an iron fist for thirty years. He promised to return power to civilians through “free” elections after an eighteen-month transition. But, eighteen months later, in October 2022, he extended it by two years. On the 20th of the same month, thousands of Chadians took to the streets to protest.

The government acknowledged the death of around fifty people, but many more died according to NGOs and the opposition, young men killed by police and soldier bullets in N’Djamena. On Thursday, the government assured in a press release that six members of the security forces had been “savagely” killed by demonstrators on October 20, 2022, including three in N’Djamena.

Huge raids also targeted youth and opposition leaders, most of whom fled into exile, such as the president of the Transformers, Succès Masra. The authorities recognized the arrest of 621 young people, including 83 minors, all taken to a sinister penal colony in Koro Toro, in the middle of the desert 600 kilometers from the capital, where they were tried a month and a half later behind closed doors, without lawyers, and most of them sentenced to prison.

Dozens or even hundreds of missing

Chadian and international NGOs and experts commissioned by the UN have cited 1,000 to 2,000 arrests and dozens, even hundreds, of missing people. “We are still asking for their bodies buried in the desert,” says Djimrangar Ngueto. Some of the 72 arrested on October 8 were preparing Succès Masra’s return to Chad to commemorate “Black Thursday.” Threatened with an international arrest warrant, he postponed it until November.

These arrests and the “threat” to arrest their leader are attempts to “limit political dissent” before the constitutional referendum of December 17, deplored Human Rights Watch (HRW), which sees “a means of transforming the government of transition into a permanent government” by preventing the opposition from “meeting and campaigning.” Asked by AFP about these accusations, the government spokesperson did not respond.

The main reason for this new turn of the screw, “is that Succès Masra, which occupied the political and media space before October 20, scares President Déby but also other actors in the transition who aim for next presidential election”, estimates Kelma Manatouma, Chadian researcher in political science at the University of Paris-Nanterre.

The real question is these elections, “credible or not”, adds Evariste Ngarlem Toldé: “if Mahamat Déby announces his candidacy, there will be demonstrations, that’s why he is doing everything, until then, to scare everyone. »