Chad president's colourful life ends abruptly in the battlefield.
Yesterday the authorities of Chad announced the death of President Idriss Déby, who governed the country since 1990. The regular army has been fighting against the FACT rebels, trying to prevent them from capturing N'Djaména. Generally speaking, Chad has a rather eventful history of domestic instability, foreign involvement and invasions (check out the Toyota War against Gaddafi) and of course civil wars. President Déby was truly a child of his country.
As the former underling of the previous dictator, Hissène Habré (still alive in a Senegal prison, I believe), Déby's reputation increased for repulsing the invasion of Libya during the mid '80s. Unfortunately, Habré suspected him of conspiracy, so Déby fled, while his associates were summarily executed. He sought refuge to the two traditional antagonists of Chad, Sudan and Libya. While in Libya, there are even rumours that he cooperated with Gaddafi in revealing the intelligence secrets of Chad and perhaps even CIA. Finally, Déby managed to launch a coup that overthrew Habré and has been governing the country since then, having amended the constitutional limits of the presidency terms.
Similarly to his illustrious predecessor, Déby couldn't avoid counter-coups, violent insurgencies and nefarious plots, but the President proved to be remarkably resilient, although his son, notorious for punching ministers, was murdered in Paris. Politic-wise, despite his brief romance with Gaddafi's anti-imperialism, Déby has reoriented his foreign policy, helping France in her intervention in the Mali civil war and convincing Paris to freeze the assets of his opponents. As for the civil wars, in spite of some religious connotations, the Christian north versus the Muslim south, there are basically struggles between tribal warlords about who is going to monopolise the exploitation of the state resources.
Mahmud Mahdi Ali, the man who finally managed to eliminate President Déby, has a long history of involvement in various insurrections, as a head of groups with so many different acronyms that would daunt even the most ruthless bureaucrat of the US alphabet soup agencies. In the steps of Déby, he was welcomed in Sudan and then Libya, where he allied with the militias of Misrata and general Khaftar (basically the eastern Libyan faction). So, what does the death of President Déby mean for Chad and the surrounding lands? Are the rebels closer to victory or what will simply happen is the disintegration of central authority and the libyafication of Chad? I don't think the name or the creed of the dictator in charge matter, but a Libya-style anarchy wouldn't go well for an impoverished, already weak and ecologically vulnerable country, like Chad.
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