Word: habre
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...occasional gunshot or the roar of a Libyan jet fighter wheeling overhead, within the capital an eerie quiet reigns. The bulk of the residents who fled N'Djamena when fighting broke out between Oueddei supporters and the rival forces of former Defense Minister Hissène Habré do not seem convinced that the danger is past. Each morning, canoes ferry thousands of women across the muddy, slow-moving Chari River from the Cameroon village of Kousseri to market their wares in Chad. Their bundles include huge stocks of emergency food doled out by international relief agencies at their...
...district along Charles de Gaulle Avenue, where office buildings and foreign embassies were not so much blasted apart by heavy shelling as nibbled to bits by machine-gun fire. The most macabre reminder of the fighting is scattered along several hundred yards of a dried-up stream bed behind Habré's former headquarters: clumps of human skeletons, many with their hands bound by elastic cords. Government officials say they were prisoners and innocent city dwellers butchered by Habré's forces as they retreated before the Libyan onslaught last December...
...nearly a decade. Since 1973 Libyan troops have occupied the Aozou strip, a uranium-and manganese-rich area astride the Chad-Libyan border. On Libyan maps, the zone is known as Southern Libya. It was Tripoli's annexation of the strip that led to the original split between Habré and Oueddei, both northern Muslims who had been allied against the southern Christian government headed by General Félix Malloum. Habré, who had previously received arms from Gadaffi, resisted the Libyan incursion, while Oueddei became Gadaffi's new favorite. Even that relationship has been severely strained...
...were more aggressively interested in the outcome. Oueddei was actively backed by his neighbor to the north, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, who had previously seized a swatch of disputed borderland. Chad seemed to fit neatly into the Libyan leader's ultimate dream of a sub-Saharan republic. Habré, meanwhile, was less directly supported by France, as part of Paris' abiding policy of trying to maintain a forceful role in the affairs of the French-speaking former African colonies...
...week, which all but ended the civil war. The Libyan invasion force included more than 4,000 infantry, backed by 50 Soviet-supplied T-54 and T-55 tanks, along with 122-mm rocket launchers, 81-mm mortars and even U.S.-built Chinook helicopters. Against such unexpected fire power, Habré's forces retreated across the Chari River into Cameroon. Two days later Habré agreed to a cease-fire sponsored by the Organization of African Unity...