Negue Djogo

Last updated

Negue Djogo (born February 2, 1932) was a Chadian officer and politician.

A French-trained Sara Catholic officer, [1] his first prominent assignment came in 1966 when, still a lieutenant, he was made by President François Tombalbaye prefect of the key Bourkou-Ennedi-Tibesti (BET) region, which France, Chad's former colonial power, had evacuated only in 1964, four years after the independence of the country. He was among those accused of misrule by the French Administrative Reform Mission (MRA) in 1969, for his contempt of Muslim traditions and especially of the dia, the blood wealth.

All the same, under Tombalbaye Djogo made a fast career and became general and Chief of Staff of the Chadian Armed Forces (FAT), when he was arrested by the President on March 23, 1975, in what was yet another of many purges in the army. He did not remain long in jail: on April 13 a military coup removed Tombalbaye. Immediately freed from jail, the coupists offered him the presidency of the new military junta, but when he declined they asked Félix Malloum, who on April 15 assumed the position of new head of state of the country. Djogo took the office of minister of finance. [1]

Malloum's military government crumbled in 1979 when the Prime Minister Hissène Habré, a former Muslim warlord, broke with the President on February 12 and attacked the capital N'Djamena with his militia, the Armed Forces of the North (FAN). The army's Head of staff, general Nguemourou, reacted weakly and finally resigned the command to Djogo on February 14. His authority was early contested by the colonel Wadel Abdelkader Kamougué, the head of the gendarmerie , the military police, which was the sole unit of the army that did not disintegrate in the battle; and when the FAT, defeated, left the capital for Southern Chad on April 15, Kamougué was in command while Djogo remained at N'Djamena.

The rift was becoming evident already in the second peace conference held at Kano in Nigeria between April 3 and April 11, when all factions were invited to form a Transitional Government of National Unity (GUNT). Djogo was able to eclipse here Kamougué, and as a result Djogo was nominated Vice President of the new government sworn in on April 29, as representative of the FAT. President became Lol Mohamed Shawa, a protégé of Nigeria, Habré Defense Minister and Goukouni Oueddei Interior Minister. Djogo was also proclaimed commander-in-chief of the new armed forces that were to unite the old FAT and the militias.

The government did not live long, principally for the exclusion from the GUNT of important Libya-supported militias, which promptly formed a counter-government, the Democratic Revolutionary Council (CDR), led by Ahmat Acyl. Also, many countries refused to recognize the new government: Djogo experimented this personally at the 6th Franco-African Summit held at Kigali on May 21 and May 22. Djogo had been entrusted with leading the Chadian delegation at the summit, when doubt on the GUNT's representativity voiced by a number of delegates brought to the abrupt departure of the Chadians.

Bye mid-summer it was clear that the end of Shawa's government was at hand. Nigeria opened new rounds of negotiation for the formation of a more comprehensive government; after a first failure, the second conference held at Lagos was more successful, and all factions, including the CDR, signed the Lagos Accord on August 21. As a result, o new GUNT was formed on September 3, with Goukouni as new president and Kamougué as vice president. [1]

Djogo tried to politically reemerge by attacking Kamougué. The occasion came on March 1, 1980, when he promoted in N'Djamena a manifesto for the formation a unitarian decentralized state, but he obtained little support for it, mainly some officers that had not followed Kamougué in 1979 and also some functionaries tied to the former Tombalbaye Regime.

When Habré, who had broken with the GUNT in 1980, conquered N'Djamena in 1982 and made himself new president, the other northern factions of the GUNT refused to surrender and reunited their forces in the BET Prefecture. While Goukouni remained its president, its military forces were united under the command of Djogo, who proved himself an able general defeating Habré's forces at Gouro and Ounianga in 1982. He was also the nominal commander of the GUNT's new army, the National Liberation Army (Armée de Libération National or ALN), which with massive Libyan man support inflicted a crushing blow to Habré's forces between June and August 1983.

In 1984 Djogo broke with the GUNT, unhappy of its internal disputes. He formed in Paris in 1985 the Democratic Front of Chad (Front Démocratique du Tchad or FDT), a coalition of groups that opposed both Goukouni and Habré. But Habré was able to win over the party in peace talks held at Libreville in Gabon under the patronage of the President Omar Bongo, which included also Alphonse Kotiga's Codos and Acheikh ibn Oumar's CAC-CDR. Djogo signed for his party on December 23, 1985. In exchange Djogo became Minister of Justice, but Habré remains in full control with his National Union for Independence and Revolution (UNIR) sole legal party. And even if Djogo insisted in a press conference held on March 4, 1986, that the FDT's goal was to restore democratic liberties, he remained unsurprisingly vague.

In mid-1988 he was shifted to the Ministry of transportation and civil aviation, and finally entered in 1989 in the Central Committee of the UNIR with other former opposition leaders. His downfall came in 1990 with the ruin of Habré, who was overthrown by Idriss Déby; from then he lost any political importance.

Related Research Articles

Chad, officially the Republic of Chad, is a landlocked country in Central Africa. It borders Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest, and Niger to the west. Due to its distance from the sea and its largely desert climate, the country is sometimes referred to as the "Dead Heart of Africa".

Goukouni Oueddei is a Chadian politician who served as President of Chad from 1979 to 1982.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">FROLINAT</span> Rebel group in Chad in 1966–1993

FROLINAT was an insurgent rebel group active in Chad between 1966 and 1993.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Félix Malloum</span> President of Chad from 1975 to 1978

Félix Malloum or Félix Malloum Ngakoutou Bey-Ndi was a Chadian military officer and politician who served as the second President of Chad from 1975 to 1978.

Wadel Abdelkader Kamougué was a Chadian politician and army officer. Kamougué was a leading figure in the 1975 coup d'état and subsequently held several positions in the Chadian government and legislature. He was Vice President of Chad from 1979 to 1982 and President of the National Assembly from 1997 to 2002. Kamougué was also President of the Union for Renewal and Democracy (URD) political party, and he was appointed as Minister of National Defense in April 2008.

The 1975 coup d'état in Chad that terminated Tombalbaye's government received an enthusiastic response in the capital N'Djamena. Félix Malloum emerged as the chairman of the new Supreme Military Council, and the first days of the new regime were celebrated as many political prisoners were released. His government included more Muslims from northern and eastern Chad, but ethnic and regional dominance still remained very much in the hands of southerners.

The Transitional Government of National Unity was the coalition government of armed groups that nominally ruled Chad from 1979 to 1982, during the most chaotic phase of the long-running civil war that began in 1965. The GUNT replaced the fragile alliance led by Félix Malloum and Hissène Habré, which collapsed in February 1979. GUNT was characterized by intense rivalries that led to armed confrontations and Libyan intervention in 1980. Libya intervened in support of the GUNT's President Goukouni Oueddei, against the former GUNT Defence Minister Hissène Habré.

The Chadian Armed Forces were the army of the central government of Chad from 1960 to 1979, under the southern presidents François Tombalbaye and Félix Malloum, until the downfall of the latter in 1979, when the head of the gendarmerie, Wadel Abdelkader Kamougué, assumed command. Joined by gendarmerie units, FAT became a regional force representing primarily the Sara ethnic group of the five southern prefectures. It joined with the Transitional Government of National Unity (GUNT) forces fighting against Hissène Habré and was a recipient of aid from Libya. FAT began to disintegrate during 1982 as a result of defeats inflicted by Habré's Armed Forces of the North (FAN). Most remaining soldiers accepted integration into FAN or resumed their insurgency as codos.

Abba Siddick was a Muslim Chadian politician and revolutionary born in what was the Oubangui-Chari French colony. In passing in Chad, he entered in active politics in the Chadian Progressive Party (PPT), a nationalist and radical African political party founded in 1947 and led by Gabriel Lisette. By 1958, he had left the PPT to form with others the Chadian National Union (UNT), a Muslim progressive party, but he turned quite early to the PPT and, after the independence of Chad, was minister of Education of the President François Tombalbaye. However the President's discrimination against Muslims in Chad brought him to become a member of the rebel insurgent group FROLINAT, formed in 1966 to oppose the rule of Tombalbaye. After the death of the organization's first secretary-general in 1968, a vicious battle for leadership ensued, which terminated with the victory of Siddick in 1969, even though he was perceived as an Anti-Arab and was suspected of being a moderate leftist and not having any revolutionary apprenticeship. He made Tripoli the headquarters of the front; and Libya took the place of Sudan as key supplier of the FROLINAT. While he was internationally recognized as the head of the FROLINAT, he was losing control of the units on the ground. In 1971 he tried to reassert his authority by proposing to unify the insurgent forces active in Chad, but Goukouni Oueddei, head of the Second Liberation Army of the FROLINAT, broke with Siddick, who managed to at least keep a loose control over the First Liberation Army.

The Kano Accord was preceded by the collapse of central authority in Chad in 1979, when the Prime Minister, Hissène Habré, had unleashed his militias on February 12 against the capital N'Djamena and the sitting president, Félix Malloum. To route the President's forces, Habré had allied himself with the rival warlord Goukouni Oueddei, who entered N'Djamena on February 22 at the head of his People's Armed Forces (FAP).

The 1975 Chadian coup d'état was in considerable part generated by the growing distrust of the president of Chad, François Tombalbaye, for the army. This distrust came in part from the Chadian Armed Forces (FAT) incapacity to deal with the rebellion that was inflaming the Muslim north from when the rebel insurgent group FROLINAT had been formed in 1966.

The Popular Movement for the Liberation of Chad was a small rebel group active in Chad during the civil war.

Acyl Ahmat Akhabach (1944–1982) was a Chadian Arab militia leader during the Chadian Civil War. He was the head of the Democratic Revolutionary Council until his death in 1982, and served as the foreign minister in Goukouni Oueddei's government.

The Democratic Front of Chad was a Chadian political party active in the 1980s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chadian–Libyan War</span> 1978–1987 series of military campaigns

The Chadian–Libyan War was a series of military campaigns in Chad between 1978 and 1987, fought between Libyan and allied Chadian forces against Chadian groups supported by France, with the occasional involvement of other foreign countries and factions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Operation Manta</span>

Operation Manta was a French military intervention in Chad between 1983 and 1984, during the Chadian–Libyan conflict. The operation was prompted by the invasion of Chad by a joint force of Libyan units and Chadian Transitional Government of National Unity (GUNT) rebels in June 1983. While France was at first reluctant to participate, the Libyan air-bombing of the strategic oasis of Faya-Largeau starting on July 31 led to the assembling in Chad of 3,500 French troops, the biggest French intervention since the end of the colonial era.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chad–Libya relations</span> Bilateral relations

Chad–Libya relations have arisen out of centuries of ethnic, religious, and commercial ties.

The National Union for Independence and Revolution was the ruling party in Chad between 1984 and 1990. It was founded in June 1984 by President Hissène Habré as a successor of his Armed Forces of the North, the insurgent group through which Habré had conquered power in 1982. The party was banned six years later by Idriss Déby when he assumed power by overthrowing Habré in the 1990 coup d'état.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chadian Civil War (1965–1979)</span> Rebellion against Presidents François Tombalbaye and Félix Malloum

The Chadian Civil War of 1965–1979 was waged by several rebel factions against two Chadian governments. The initial rebellion erupted in opposition to Chadian President François Tombalbaye, whose regime was marked by authoritarianism, extreme corruption, and favoritism. In 1975 Tombalbaye was murdered by his own army, and a military government headed by Félix Malloum emerged and continued the war against the insurgents. Following foreign interventions by Libya and France, the fracturing of the rebels into rival factions, and an escalation of the fighting, Malloum stepped down in March 1979. This paved the way for a new national government, known as "Transitional Government of National Unity" (GUNT).

References

  1. 1 2 3 Decalo, Samuel (1997). Historical Dictionary of Chad. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. ISBN   0-8108-3253-4.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.