27 May 2022 | Chad, News and features
Swearing in ceremony of President Idriss Deby Itno of Chad in 2016. Photo: Paul Kagame, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
More than a year after Chad’s former president was killed in battle, the central African country remains in turmoil and freedom of expression remains under attack.
Idriss Déby Itno was killed in April 2021 on the battlefront between government troops and rebels from the Front for Change and Concord in the north of the country. His death was announced just a day after provisional results from the 11th April president election showed he had won re-election.
The election result was widely seen as dubious. Leading opposition figure Saleh Kebzabo had withdrawn from the elections after family members of another candidate were killed during a deadly shootout.
Chad has been under the increasingly authoritarian grip of Idriss Déby Itno since 1990 when he seized power in a coup.
In March 2018, Déby had implemented a social media ban following widespread public protests against constitutional changes that would have allowed him to rule until 2033. The ban was lifted only 16 months later.
The country has been the target of regular internet shutdowns by the government. The KeepItOn coalition says there were more than 900 days of internet shutdowns, including throttling of internet speeds, total internet blackouts as well as the social media blocks, between 2016 and 2021.
After Déby’s death, the military took control, dissolving parliament and putting a transitional military council (TMC) in charge of the country under the leadership of Déby’s son Mahamat.
The council promised free and democratic elections within 18 months, following a national reconciliation dialogue that would involve parties from all sides.
In September, the TMC appointed a 93-member national transitional council to perform the functions of government. However, some prominent members of Wakit Tama, a coalition of human rights groups and opposition figures, who had denounced the coup were excluded for this.
That process has since moved slowly, and free and fair elections look unlikely any time soon. An inability to agree on who should be involved in the council and any national reconciliation dialogue has slowed the process to a crawl, although some of the parties are now in the Qatari capital Doha taking part in what is being called a pre-dialogue, a process that has already lasted two months.
The transition to fair and free elections has now been thrown into even greater disarray after a number of civil society leaders were detained during protests on 14th May organised by Wakit Tama.
During the protests, several symbols of France’s colonial power, including a number of Total petrol stations, were attacked and policemen injured. Wakit Tama and the four arrested have denied any involvement in the violence.
The four arrested were Gounoung Vaima Gan Fare, secretary general of the Union des Syndicats du Tchad, Youssouf Korom Ahmat, secretary general of the Syndicat des commercants fournisseurs du Tchad, Koudé Mbainaissem, a lawyer and president of the Association for Freedom of Expression, as well as Wakit Tama coordinator Max Loalngar.
The protests were intended to highlight human rights violations in the country, call for the inclusion of human rights defenders in the transition and oppose a continuing French military presence in Chad.
Opposition leader Saleh Kebzabo said the protests threatened the process of reconciliation.
Three days after the protests he tweeted, “In Doha, there is a Chad in miniature where nearly 200 Chadians have been engaged in a debate for two months to participate in the [national reconciliation dialogue]. All Chadians are waiting for this unique moment for a real rebuilding of the country, and I believe it is a unique opportunity.”
“During this time, we learn that other Chadians are preparing the [dialogue] in their own way by marches to ransack and loot, against the French presence in Chad. This is a false debate that risks hiding all our real problems, which are unfortunately many.”
The four are currently being detained at the high security Mossoro prison and will face a court hearing on 6th June, although none has yet been charged with any offence. Front Line Defenders believes that they are being targeted “solely as a result of their legitimate and peaceful work in defence of human rights”. Human Rights Watch calls the detentions “politically motivated”.
Despite the pre-dialogue in Doha, the government has now postponed the main dialogue on a transition to democracy to some unspecified date in the future. The omens are not good.
9 Aug 2011 | Asia and Pacific, China, Iran, Middle East and North Africa
State media in China and Iran have both offered their two cents in response to the riots that have swept the UK over the past three days.
A commentator at Communist Party mouthpiece, People’s Daily, opined that this sort of chaos is precisely the result of a lack of censorship of social networking websites:
The West have been talking about supporting internet freedom, and oppose other countries’ government to control this kind of websites, now we can say they are tasting the bitter fruit [of their complacency] and they can’t complain about it.
News agency Xinhua, remembering Beijing’s smooth staging of the 2008 Olympics, said:
After the riots, the image of London has been severely damaged, leaving the people sceptical and worried about the public security situation during the London Olympics.
Meanwhile, Press TV reported that Iran’s Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast “urged the British government to order the police to stop their violent confrontation with the people.” He also “asked independent human rights organisations to investigate the killing in order to protect the civil rights and civil liberties.”
23 Dec 2009 | Index Index, minipost
Cameroonian journalist Innocent Ebodé was abducted from his home in the Chadian capital N’Djamena on 21 December. A military source said that he is safe in Kousséri, across the border in Cameroon, but Ebodé’s family and lawyer have not heard from him. The abduction, said to be by two men in civilian clothing, follows the journalist’s deportation in mid-October and the closure of the independent N’Djamena-based newspaper he edits, La Voix, in November. His lawyer expressed concern that the abduction was linked to the journalist’s intention to attend a court hearing regarding the seizure of La Voix on 3 December.
Read Reporters Sans Frontières open letter to Chad’s minister of the interior here
29 Nov 2024 | News and features, Venezuela
As thoughts turn to the festive season, Americans will have the chance to ponder what the New Year and a Donald Trump presidency will mean. But this is not the only significant election in the continent to have happened this year.
This weekend Venezuelans will take to the streets to demonstrate against President Nicolás Maduro’s refusal to acknowledge his defeat in elections on 28 July. The opposition candidate, 75-year-old Edmundo González Urrutia, has pledged to return to the country from exile in Spain to take office on 10 January 2025, ten days before the Trump inauguration. His victory has been recognised by the international community, including the White House.
International human rights groups have raised concerns about the increasing authoritarianism of the Maduro government with widespread surveillance of its citizens and arbitrary detention of political opponents. According to UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency, 7.7 million Venezuelans have left the country as of May 2024, which accounts for roughly 20% of the entire population.
González, who has never stood for office before, took the place of the original opposition candidate Maria Corina Machado, when she was banned from standing by the government and forced into hiding. Machado now faces charges from the Venezuelan federal prosecutor, which accuses her of supporting American sanctions against her country.
Machado has joined fellow opposition figure Magalli Meda in calling for protestors around the world to paint their hands red as a symbol of the suffering of the Venezuelan people as they take to the streets around the world. The UN reported that at least 23 protesters were killed at anti-government demonstrations in the weeks after the election and approximately 2,400 were arrested.
Despite the desperate situation for Venezuela as it sinks further into economic crisis and international isolation, this year’s elections have provided a model of democratic activism. Voters were shocked when the government announced that Maduro had gained a convenient 51 per cent of the vote but failed to provide numbers. This in a country whose election system was described by the Carter Center, set up by the former US President Jimmy Carter, as “the best in the world”.
In this context, readers of this newsletter would be advised to listen to the latest episode of the This American Life podcast, which includes a report on Venezuela by Nancy Updike. A transcript is also available.
Updike tells the story of the movement, led by citizens, to document the country’s entire voting record, precisely in case that Maduro’s ruling party tried to fix the vote. The movement was called Seiscientos Kah, which means 600k, and was so named because of the number of volunteers needed to make the checks. The organiser is now in hiding.
Every voting machine in Venezuela prints out a tally of votes for each candidate on election day. Each candidate is allowed a witness at every one of the 30,000 machines stationed around the country. 600k was set up as a giant relay race with the witnesses at the start and activists collecting the results and taking them to monitoring centres at secret locations. Here, using a laptop, a scanner, and a portable generator, the results were then uploaded to a website and the original copies taken to a separate secret location.
This extraordinary process meant that when polling closed, opposition supporters across the country uploaded videos of people reading out the results, which had come directly from the voting machines.
The situation in Venezuela remains grim. Updike quotes from a UN report on the protests against Maduro after the election. Those charged with terrorism and incitement to hatred included: “opposition political leaders, individuals who simply participated in the protests, persons who sympathised with the opposition or criticised the government, journalists who covered the protests, lawyers for those detained, human rights defenders, and members of the academic community”.
A statement from a member of the UN fact-finding mission said that many of those detained: “were subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, as well as sexual violence, which was perpetrated against women and girls, but also against men”.
Maduro has called the actions of the 600k movement a “coup”. In fact, it may provide a blueprint for the fight against election-rigging by authoritarian governments around the world.
