Word: libya
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Chad is remote - almost equidistant from the Red Sea, the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean. From 1966 onward it was racked by 25 years of war. N'Djamena was destroyed and the country divided into rival fiefdoms. Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi tried to annex Chad, prompting France and the U.S. to fund a covert contra war in support of Chadian warlord-turned-President Hissène Habr...
...among the French-trained Chadian warriors who defeated Gaddafi's army in 1987. He then chased Libya's proxy Arab militias - known as Janjaweed - into Darfur, sparking that region's descent into bloodshed. But Déby soon fell out with Habré, who tortured and executed thousands of opponents, real and suspected. Déby is a Zaghawa - part of a tribe of black Saharans equally at home in Darfur, Chad and the oases of the Libyan Sahara. Armed by Sudan and Libya, he stormed across the Chadian savanna from rear bases in Darfur and seized power...
...feisty talk, Gaddafi is a near-perfect customer for Sarkozy, if not quite yet his savior. Flush with revenues from record-high oil prices, the Libyan leader is rebuilding his military virtually from scratch, since decades-long Western sanctions banned him from purchasing arms and replacing broken equipment. "Libya's military inventories during the embargoes degraded to the point of being useless," says Matthew Smith, economics analyst for Jane's, the London-based defense research group. The organization this week estimates Libya's military spending was about $620 million last year - small change for the gargantuan defense industry. And since...
...government has learned bitter lessons, like France's failure to coordinate negotiations at a top level, or to streamline its cumbersome bureaucracy. "We have to make sure we are in tune, speak the same language, and are quick enough not to be overtaken by someone else," Morin said. Libya's negotiations will be run out of the Elysee Palace, rather the Defense Ministry...
...both sides hunker down in talks, the political arguments in France are unlikely to subside. Dassault's president Charles Edelstenne said yesterday that criticisms over Libya's human-rights records were irrelevant to his negotiations. "If we start to enter into that debate there wouldn't be any international trade," he said. Yet other doubts could also emerge, including the real danger of selling lethal weaponry to an uncertain ally, who has only just emerged from a very long isolation. Says Brookes: "If Libyan Rafales were to end up with a third party who used them against Western forces...