In April 2021, Chad’s longtime President Idriss Deby died unexpectedly on the frontlines of a fight against the rebel Front for Change and Concord in Chad (French acronym FACT). He was almost immediately succeeded by a transitional military-led regime headed by his son Mahamat Deby. The new regime, called the Transitional Military Council (French acronym CMT), put forth plans for an eighteen-month transition, with the provision that the eighteen months can be renewed once if necessary (see the Transition Charter, Article 97). Chad’s authorities have been given substantially more leeway by regional and international actors than have other current juntas in Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso.
Per the “roadmap” adopted by the transitional legislature in July 2021, one key element of Chad’s transition is a planned Inclusive National Dialogue with rebels. The Dialogue was originally slated to take place in either November or December 2021, with elections to follow between June and September 2022. The authorities have presented the Dialogue as an indispensable step; my reading is that they hope to (a) project an image of national unity, (b) bolster their own perceived legitimacy, (c) co-opt as many rebels as possible, and (d) portray any holdouts as bad-faith actors. The Dialogue is being supported by Qatar, which is also acting as a mediator; some key rebels are based in Qatar, such as Timan Erdimi (read an interview with him from late 2021 here).
A “pre-dialogue” set of negotiations, meanwhile, has been taking place in Doha. Here is Al Jazeera:
About 50 rebel groups [have] presented their demands to a delegation of 24 government representatives.
Among the requests, the groups asked for guaranteed safety if they return to the country and for the release of prisoners of war. The government is keen to hand amnesty to those accused of acts of rebellion and to free all members of the rebel groups who will sign amnesty agreements, according to a document seen by Al Jazeera.
But there is disagreement concerning other demands of the rebels, such as banning members of the TMC from running in the next elections, army reforms and a constitutional revision.
The National Dialogue has now been postponed three times. Most recently, on May 1, Chad’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced that at the request of Qatar, it was delaying the Dialogue until an unspecified date. As discussed in the Al Jazeera article linked above, moreover, there was pressure from rebels and from civil society groups for the authorities to delay, even as Deby suggested for a while that he would stick to the timeline. Not to be too cynical, but the image of the junta reluctantly postponing the Dialogue to accommodate other actors doesn’t quite convince me; it is clearly politically advantageous for the TMC to prolong the negotiations until it gets maximum buy-in, and the TMC may be quite wary of the reforms it may be called upon to make – and dissidents it may have to let back into Chad – after the Dialogue concludes.
Meanwhile, the CMT can use the Dialogue as a reason for tinkering with the overall timeline of the transition. On that note, this latest delay increases the chances that the whole transition will be delayed – in other words, that the authorities will invoke the clause in the charter that lets them renew the eighteen-month window. There is now talk of holding the Dialogue in June or July, and then elections towards the very end of the year. From the rebel side, some groups say they want a delay in the Dialogue but not a delay in the transition itself.
Sahel Blog 