2023-05-24 20:38:32
The President of Chad on Wednesday pardoned, as he had promised, a new wave of 67 people sentenced for having participated in a bloodily repressed demonstration on October 20, 2022, and 11 others for a foiled “coup d’état” in December according to N’Djamena.
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In a second decree on the same day, President Déby pardoned Baradine Berdei Targuio, president of the Chadian Human Rights Organization (OTDH), and 10 army officers. They had been arrested in December 2022 and accused of fomenting a “Rebellion”, then sentenced in mid-May to 20 years in prison, in particular for “undermining the constitutional order”.
On October 20, 2022, at the call of an already severely repressed opposition, demonstrators marched in N’Djamena and a few other cities to protest against the maintenance in power for two more years of transitional President Mahamat Déby.
This young general had been proclaimed head of state by the army on April 21, 2021 at the head of a military junta of 15 generals, on the announcement of the death of his father Idriss Déby Itno, killed at the front by soldiers. rebel fire after ruling Chad for 30 years with an iron fist.
600 young men
Mahamat Déby immediately promised to return power to civilians through elections after an 18-month transition period. But at the end of his term, he had extended his mandate for two years on the recommendation of a national reconciliation dialogue boycotted by the quasi-majority of the civil opposition and the most powerful armed rebel movements.
The security forces had violently repressed the demonstration of October 20 in N’Djamena: the government had recognized the death of 73 people, mainly young men shot dead by the soldiers and police, but the opposition and the NGOs had ensured that hundreds had perished that day or the following days in gigantic raids.
More than 600 young men, including at least 80 minors, were arrested on October 20 and the following days and sent to a prison in the middle of the desert, in Koro Toro, more than 600 km from N’Djamena. There, they were tried, after months of detention, without lawyers and without journalists from the non-governmental press.
More than half had been sentenced to prison, the others to suspended sentences or released. During the transport of the prisoners to Koro Toro, but also during the raids, local and international NGOs claimed that tens or even hundreds of people were tortured or executed, which the authorities denied.
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