Chad’s National Human Rights Commission (CNDH) estimates the death toll of the bloody repression in October of opposition protests against the extension of the transition at 128, in a report sent to AFP on Thursday, February 23. .
On October 20, 2022, opposition demonstrations against the maintenance in power for two additional years of the transitional president, General Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, were bloodily repressed in N’Djamena, the capital, and in other other cities in the country.
The authorities had first announced that around fifty people had died, mainly young people shot dead in the capital by the police, before reassessing this toll at 73 dead. NGOs, however, denounced undervalued figures.
“The official figures (…) are different from those obtained after the investigations of the National Commission for Human Rights”, indicates the CNDH, which specifies that its work has “mainly concerned the cities most affected by the repression, in particular those of N’Djamena, Moundou, Doba, Koumra and Sarh”.
“Black Thursday”
According to investigators, 943 people were arrested, 435 detained and 12 disappeared. The CNDH “attributes the main responsibility for all these human rights violations to agents vested with the authority of the State, namely the FDS [security forces], who have clearly failed in their tasks in the chain of events,” the report notes.
During this “Black Thursday”, 621 people, according to the government, had been arrested and then transported to Koro-Toro, a high security prison in the middle of the desert 600 kilometers north of N’Djamena. They were then tried in a mass trial, without lawyers or independent media, after a month and a half of detention. “Four dead bodies arrived in Koro-Toro, died en route and eight died as a result of ill-treatment” in this prison, indicates the CNDH.
The CNDH, created in 2019, has the mission of protecting and promoting human rights and sends opinions to the government, the President of the Republic and the National Assembly.