African mediators were expected yesterday in the oil-rich capital N'Djamena from where tens of thousands of people have fled as rebels renewed their most forceful attempt yet to oust Chadian President Idriss Deby.
The fighting in N'Djamena threatened to further destabilize an already violent swath of Africa that is home to hundreds of thousands of refugees and borders Sudan's war-ravaged Darfur region.
Hours after the rebels went back on the attack on Monday, the UN Security Council authorized France and other nations to help Chad's government. France has 1,800 soldiers backed by fighter jets in its former colony.
France is ready to launch a military operation in Chad against rebels there if necessary, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said yesterday.
"If France must do its duty, it will do so," Sarkozy said in response to a question on a possible military operation in Chad. "Let no one doubt it."
Sarkozy said French troops have taken no part in the fighting -- except last Friday night, when they opened fire to protect French civilians. He said that was a case of self-defense.
Sarkozy dismissed as "absolutely not exact" rebel claims that French forces had killed civilians.
However, Sarkozy insisted it would be better to "leave Chad alone."
"If Chad were a victim of an aggression, France would have -- and I stress the conditional tense -- the means to resist this action," he said.
High-level officials and diplomats from the Republic of Congo and Libya were to arrive yesterday on an African Union mediation mission, the republic's Foreign Affairs Minister Basile Ikouebe said on Monday in Brazzaville. They would meet with both sides, and France had agreed to protect the mediators, he said.
There were fears of a wider regional conflict. Chadian officials have repeatedly accused Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir of supporting the rebels, and even deploying Sudanese troops in rebel offensives in eastern Chad.
"We are in direct war with Omar Bashir," General Mahamat Ali Abdallah Nassour said yesterday on Radio France Internationale. "It is Omar al-Bashir who wants to destabilize and Balkanize Chad."
The US asked Sudan to halt any possible aid to the rebels and use its influence "to tell them to withdraw," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said on Monday.
"We have gone in at very high levels of the Sudanese government to say that if there is any support from the Sudanese government to these rebels that that should end immediately," he said.
Ikouebe said the mediators also would be talking to Sudan.
"If any state were suspected of implication in the Chad crisis, we would have words with that state," he said.
The fighting in N'Djamena was believed to have taken a heavy toll. Bodies lay on the streets and the hulks of burned out tanks and other vehicles stood abandoned.
The death toll was not known, but "probably many people were injured or killed," said a French military spokesman, Captain Christophe Prazuck.
"The fighting was heavy, the weapons used were heavy," he said.
Isabelle Defourny, head of Chad operations for the French organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) said hundreds of people had been reported wounded.
She said fighting made it difficult to reach the wounded, but the group's doctors had treated about 70 wounded people since Saturday.
ROCKY RELATIONS: The figures on residents come as Chinese tourist numbers drop following Beijing’s warnings to avoid traveling to Japan The number of Chinese residents in Japan has continued to rise, even as ties between the two countries have become increasingly fractious, data released on Friday showed. As of the end of December last year, the number of Chinese residents had increased by 6.5 percent from the previous year to 930,428. Chinese people accounted for 22.6 percent of all foreign residents in Japan, making them by far the largest group, Japanese Ministry of Justice data showed. Beijing has criticized Tokyo in increasingly strident terms since Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi last year suggested that a military conflict around Taiwan could
A pro-Iran hacking group claimed to breach FBI Director Kash Patel’s personal e-mail inbox and posted some of the contents online. The e-mails provided by the hacking group include travel details, correspondence with leasing agents in Washington and global entry, and loyalty account numbers. The e-mail address the hackers claim to have compromised has been previously tied to Patel’s personal details, and the leaked e-mails contain photos of Patel and others, in addition to correspondence with family members and colleagues. “The FBI is aware of malicious actors targeting Director Patel’s personal email information,” the agency said in a statement on
RIVALRY: ‘We know that these are merely symbolic investigations initiated by China, which is in fact the world’s most profligate disrupter of supply chains,’ a US official said China has started a pair of investigations into US trade practices, retaliating against similar probes by US President Donald Trump’s administration as the superpowers stake out positions before an expected presidential summit in May. The move, announced by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce on Friday, is a direct mirror of steps Trump took to revive his tariff agenda after the US Supreme Court last month struck down some of his duties. “China expresses its strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to these actions,” a ministry spokesperson said in a statement, referring to the so-called Section 301 investigations initiated on March 11.
When a hiker fell from a 55m waterfall in wild New Zealand bush, rescuers were forced to evacuate the badly hurt woman without her dog, which could not be found. After strangers raised thousands of dollars for a search, border collie Molly was flown to safety by a helicopter pilot who was determined to reunite the pet and the owner. A week earlier, an emergency rescue helicopter found the woman with bruises and lacerations after a fall at a rocky spot at the waterfall on the South Island’s West Coast. She was airlifted on March 24, but they were forced to
RSS