The head of the junta in power since 2021 in Chad, General Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, transitional president, announced in a speech on Saturday March 2 that he would be a candidate in the presidential election, scheduled for May 6. “I, Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, am a candidate for the 2024 presidential election under the banner of the coalition of parties For a United Chad,” he declared, after the 221 movements forming this coalition asked him to introduce oneself.
Then aged 37, he was proclaimed transitional president by the army at the head of a junta of fifteen generals on April 20, 2021, upon the announcement of the death of his father, Marshal Idriss Déby Itno. The patriarch, absolute master of Chad for thirty years, was killed by rebels on his way to the front.
Mahamat Déby immediately promised to return power to civilians through elections after an eighteen-month transition, but when this term expired, he extended it by two years. Almost three years later, his junta has politically or physically removed any rival, and the opposition accuses him of perpetuating “the Déby dynasty”. He seems determined to follow in his father’s footsteps and prepare for a long reign.
A legitimacy that wavers
The date of the first round of the presidential election, May 6, was only announced on Tuesday. On Wednesday, the army killed Yaya Dillo Djérou, cousin and main rival of the head of state in the presidential race, during an assault on the headquarters of his party, the Socialist Party Without Borders (PSF). The army accused him of having instigated an “assassination attempt” on the President of the Supreme Court ten days earlier and an attack on the intelligence services the day before.
The PSF assured Agence France-Presse (AFP) that Mr. Dillo Djérou had been “executed at point blank range” with a bullet to the head. The opposition denounced an “assassination” to oust him from the election.
To assert his authority, Mahamat Déby – whose legitimacy within the Déby family and his ethnic group, the Zaghawa, has been wavering since the death of his cousin – has removed several generals loyal to his father in an all-powerful army including the Command is entrusted to the Zaghawa and some allies of the Goran ethnic group. He sometimes replaced them with Goranes, much to the chagrin of the Zaghawa. Mahamat is half Zaghawa on his father’s side and half Gorane on his mother’s side. But the challenge of closing ranks is far from won.
“The dangers facing opposition politicians”
Apart from the Patriotic Salvation Movement (MPS), created by Idriss Déby following his coup in 1990, the other movements are small, or even very small, satellite parties. On Saturday, the international NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) once again denounced the violent repression of the opposition by the junta by calling for an “international investigation”, with “foreign assistance”, into the “murder” of Mr. Dillo Djerou.
“The circumstances of Yaya Dillo’s murder are unclear, but her violent death illustrates the dangers facing opposition politicians in Chad, particularly in the run-up to elections,” said Lewis Mudge, director of the office. of HWR for Central Africa.
The government appointed by the junta denied, to the AFP, “any execution”, and affirmed that Mr. Dillo Djérou had perished in the assault on his party’s headquarters because he “refused to surrender” and had “shot at law enforcement himself.” HRW says it has “examined several photos transmitted by a reliable source close to Dillo, showing him dead and bearing the impact of a single bullet in the head.”
“The transitional government (…) has, on several occasions, violently repressed demonstrations organized by the opposition to demand a civilian democratic regime,” deplores HRW.
If the absence of any serious rival in the presidential election suggests an easy victory, concerns have been emerging for several months in Mahamat Déby’s camp about an increasingly marked discord within the family clan and the Zaghawa ethnic group. . Very much a minority in the country, it has been master of the military and the State for thirty-three years.
