Chad’s President Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno on Monday (March 27) pardoned 259 of the 262 protesters sentenced to prison after a bloodily repressed protest against power in October 2022, three days after another decree for 380 rebels sentenced to prison for life.
These demonstrators were tried in a mass trial behind closed doors in December, without lawyers or independent media, and after more than a month and a half of detention in a high security prison in the middle of the desert in Chad, in 600 kilometers from the capital, N’Djamena.
They had been sentenced to two to three years in prison for “acts of unauthorized assembly, destruction of property, arson, violence and assault, intentional assault and battery, disturbance of public order (…)” and “benefit from the presidential pardon”, can we read in a decree consulted by AFP and signed by Mr. Déby.
These men, mostly young people, had responded to the call to demonstrate in opposition to General Déby’s two-year extension in power in October. He had been proclaimed head of state by the military on April 20, 2021 on the announcement of the death of his father, President Idriss Déby Itno, killed at the front by rebels after leading with an iron fist. Chad for thirty years.
“Black Thursday”
“It’s a gesture of forgiveness to allow all the sons and daughters of Chad to build their country on new foundations,” communications minister and government spokesman Aziz Mahamat Saleh told AFP. “These people will regain their freedom, their families and resume the course of their lives”, rejoiced the coordinator of the collective of their lawyers, Frédéric Dainonet, who sees in this initiative a desire of the government “to ease tensions” .
But the investigation is not yet complete for another group, of which “some” detainees “are still in Koro Toro prison”, he told AFP. The investigation is still ongoing for “twenty” people detained in N’Djamena and “a hundred” others in Koro Toro prison, said Laguerre Ndjerandi, the president of N’Djamena.
According to the government, 621 people were arrested during the demonstration in the capital, then transported to Koro Toro, a high security prison in the middle of the desert 600 kilometers north of N’Djamena, where they were then tried in a trial. mass, without lawyers or independent media, after a month and a half of detention.
The authorities had first announced that about fifty people had died during this “Black Thursday”, mainly young people shot dead in the capital by the police, before reassessing this toll at 73 dead. NGOs, however, denounced undervalued figures.
“Enforced disappearances”, “acts of torture”
The NGO Human Rights Watch (HRW) denounced in a report at the end of January “murders”, “deaths in detention”, “enforced disappearances” and “acts of torture” linked to the repression of demonstrations by the authorities. . This is the second presidential pardon granted in three days.
On Saturday, a group of 380 rebels from the Front pour l’alternance et la concorde au Tchad (FACT), sentenced to life imprisonment for their involvement in the death of former President Idriss Déby Itno, benefited from the same decision of the head of state. They had also been found guilty of “act of terrorism, mercenary activity, and endangering the security of the national territory”. In the spring of 2021, FACT, the most powerful rebel group at the time, launched an offensive from its rear bases in Libya towards the capital N’Djamena.
On April 20, the army announced that Marshal Déby, who had ruled Chad for more than thirty years with an iron fist, had been killed at the front by the rebels and named one of his sons, the young General Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, President of the Republic for a period of transition, at the head of a military junta of fifteen generals.
But at the end of the transition period in October, he extended his presidency on the recommendation of a “national reconciliation dialogue” boycotted by the vast majority of the political opposition and several prominent armed rebel groups.