Chad is an unlikely country to have garnered as many headlines as it has in recent years; it is certainly not a place that one would expect to find millions of dollars worth of Soviet military equipment lying abandoned or destroyed in the desert sun. Chad has one of the smallest populations in Africa - about 5 million people. It is also one of the poorest countries in the world, with an average per capita gross national product of about $120, and its economy has been declining at a rate of about 5 percent each year since 1970. Chad's small and impoverished population occupies a huge, desolate, resourceless, and landlocked area of 495,000 square miles - about the size of France, Spain, and England combined.
But Chad has porous borders with Niger, Libya, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Cameroon, and Nigeria. The border with Libya has proven to be the greatest source of Chad's recent newsworthiness. To understand the Chadian caldron of intrigue, however, Chad's political history, the French legacy and continuing Western stakes in the area, and the interests of Chad's neighbors bear notice.
Since gaining independence from France in 1960, Chad's sovereign legal status has rested awkwardly aside its actual political disintegration. When Chad became a state, it was not a nation in even the remotest sense. The Sahelian region has been for centuries an arena of conflict between northern Arabs and non-Arabs from the east and south. Over the ages before the French arrived, amid sifting power centers and political loyalties, warrior and slave-raiding traditions arose along the caravan routes between Arab centers and black Africa. Such traditions exacerbate the racial and the religious cleavages in what is today Chad, with non-black Muslims inhabiting the desertic north (mainly Toubou tribesmen of Berber stock) and black Christians or animists inhabiting the more fertile south.
Seventy years of French rule widened the differences between north and south. The French concentrated their presence and interests in the south where the black Sara inhabitants were more receptive to them and where the climate was more hospitable. Thus, the south, led by Francois (later Ngarta) Tombalbaye and his Chadian People's Party (PPT), took control at independence.
Tombalbaye soon abolished all political parties but his own and proceeded to rule solely for the benefit of the southerners. This condition sparked a northern revolt in 1966, which called itself the National Liberation Front of Chad (FROLINAT). Eventually, with the help and military intercession of France, the government was reorganized to allow greater northern participation. But just as the new government was to be born, FROLINAT suddenly discovered an energetic and wealthy new benefactor, Muammar Qaddafi, who had come to power in Libya in September 1969.
Off the path
With Libya's backing, FROLINAT attempted a coup d'etat in 1971 and mounted a commando attack on the capital of N'djamena the next year. To relieve the pressure, Tombalbaye went to Libya in December 1972 seeking economic aid and an end to Libya backing for the rebels. In return, he befriended Qaddafi on regional issues and secretly ceded the Aouzou Strip, rumored to be rich in uranium ore, to Libya. The next year, Tombalbaye initiated a "cultural revolution" that consisted of the selective compulsory enforcement of
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