Idriss Déby, president of Chad for more than 30 years who died during fighting with rebel forces – obituary

Idriss Déby, who has died aged 68 during a battle with rebel forces, dominated Chad for more than half its tumultuous history since independence in 1960. A professional soldier, he seized power by force of arms in 1990 and maintained it over five presidential terms.

The day before his death, announced on Tuesday by an army spokesman, Déby won a sixth term of office; instead of giving a victory speech, he had gone to visit Chadian troops fighting a northern rebel incursion.

Under his rule, opponents had been ruthlessly repressed in an ethnic oligarchy which favoured his own group, the Zaghawa, a semi-nomadic people living largely along the Chad-Sudan border.

Déby’s human rights abuses were tolerated by Western governments, which saw him as providing continuity in the centre of an arc of chronic instability, the Sahel, stretching from the Horn of Africa to Guinea-Bissau.

In 2014 N’Djamena, the Chadian capital, became the headquarters of Operation Barkhane, a campaign against Islamic jihadists. It was undertaken by France, which deployed a force of more than 5,000, and five Sahelian countries – Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauretania and Niger – with assistance from Britain, Estonia and Sweden.

In 2021 Chad committed 1,200 troops to the border area between Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger, the latest in a series of foreign deployments which had also been made in the Central African Republic and Nigeria.

As well as suffering interventions by foreign powers, Chad under Déby was wracked by repeated indigenous uprisings. The first came from supporters of Hissène Habré, whom he had ousted as president in 1990. Then, seeking to prevent government exploitation of the Doba oilfield, southern groups revolted. Civil war, pitting Muslims against Christians, broke out in 2005, and three years later rebels from the east – whom Déby accused Sudan of backing – reached N’Djamena before being repelled.

A later challenge, centred on the Lake Chad region in the west of the country, came from Boko Haram, the jihadist terrorist organisation based in north-eastern Nigeria.

In an attempt to quell dissent, Déby had legalised political parties in 1993, which opened the way to the first multi-party elections in the country’s history three years later. He won on the second round, having failed to secure a majority in the first, and his Mouvement Patriotique du Salut secured most of the National Assembly seats.

Presidential victories followed in 2001, 2006, 2011, 2016 and 2021, when according to provisional results he gained nearly 80 per cent of the vote; but parliamentary polls were repeatedly postponed after 2011, the next one being scheduled for October 2021. All the ballots were vitiated by fraud, the main opposition figures boycotting them in 2006 and 2011.

In 2005 Déby secured by referendum the abolition of the two-term limit for the presidency. It was re-introduced, albeit for terms of six rather than five years, through another referendum in 2018, which would allow him to remain in power until 2033.

Déby, who had had a successful military career under Habré, always thought of himself as a soldier, and in 2020 he was promoted field marshal by parliament after leading a counter-offensive against Boko Haram. That rank had previously been held in Africa by Jean-Bédel Bokassa – the self-styled Emperor of Central Africa – Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire, and Idi Amin of Uganda.

Idriss Déby Itno, the son of a poor herder, was born on June 18 1952 in the village of Berdoba in northern Chad, part of the federation of colonial possessions then known as French Equatorial Africa. He attended a Koranic school in Tiné, then lycées in Fada, Abéché and Bongor. He left school with a baccalauréat in science.

He began his military career at the officers school in N’Djamena before entering the Institut d’Amaury la Grange at Hazebrouck in French Flanders. Having trained as a paratrooper and acquired a pilot’s licence, he returned in 1979 to a Chad in the throes of civil war. Déby threw in his lot with Habré, who ousted General Félix Malloum, head of the junta, and later became defence minister in a transitional government of national unity.

When Habré became president in 1982 he made Déby commander-in-chief of the army. Déby saw action against pro-Libyan forces in eastern Chad before being sent to the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre in Paris. Returning in 1986, he became chief military adviser to the presidency. He took the field, with the help of France, in the “Toyota War” against Libya, so called because of the Japanese pick-up trucks used by Chadian forces, and led a cross-border raid into the Kufrah district.

The two men fell out over the increasing power of the presidential guard, Habré accusing Déby of plotting a coup. The president, a member of the Gorane ethnic group in northern Chad, launched a brutal campaign against the Zaghawa. Later, he would be indicted by an international tribunal for crimes against humanity, torture and war crimes during his eight years in power.

Déby fled to Darfur in western Sudan, then to Libya. He was welcomed by Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, whose World Revolutionary Centre near Benghazi he attended. Déby then moved back to Sudan and founded the Mouvement Patriotique du Salut. With Libyan and Sudanese help, his troops entered the Chadian capital unopposed in December 1990 and, after a few months of provisional government, he became president.

As with his presidential predecessors, Déby’s key foreign relationship was with France. Opération Epervier was launched under Habré and François Mitterrand in 1986 to contain Gaddafi’s forces, who were occupying all of Chadian territory north of the 16th parallel.

Having supported Habré against Libya, France remained neutral when he was ousted by Déby in 1990. By that time Chad had resumed diplomatic relations with Tripoli on the recommendation of the Organisation of African Unity. The final piece of disputed territory, the Aouzou Strip along the Libyan border, was awarded to Chad by an International Court of Justice ruling in 1994. However, relations worsened again with the outbreak of civil war in Libya and the killing of Gaddafi in 2011.

Opération Epervier came to an end in 2014 and was succeeded by Opération Barkhane, with the broader remit of combating Islamist groups in the Sahel.

Sudan had been the launching pad for Déby’s toppling of Habré. The new leader closed the office in Chad of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, a southern rebel group, and in 1991 the Sudanese president, Omar al-Bashir, paid an official visit to N’Djamena.

In the new century, however, their shared border posed the greatest foreign challenge to Déby’s rule. The conflict between rebels in Darfur and the government in Khartoum drove as many as 250,000 refugees into Chad, prompting Déby to mediate, without success, between the warring groups.

The territory of each country became a base for subversive activity against the other, culminating in an attack by Chadian rebels in 2006 which nearly toppled Déby, who declared his country to be in a state of war with Sudan.

In the other direction, the Darfur-based Justice and Equity Movement (JEM) launched an attack from Chad in 2008 which reached the outskirts of Khartoum, leading al-Bashir to break off diplomatic relations with N’Djamena.

After mediation by Libya and Qatar, the two leaders agreed to re-establish relations. Chad expelled the JEM and the two neighbours set up joint military border patrols, the command rotating between them at six-monthly intervals.

With the end of the southern rebellion in Chad, oil exploitation in the Doba Basin began in 2000 and a 665-mile pipeline from the basin to the Gulf of Guinea in Cameroon was completed in 2003. Controversy followed when part of the loans from investors was used to procure weapons for the Chadian army rather than to improve infrastructure, education and health.

Dependence on oil, which became the primary source of public revenue, led to a deep recession from which Chad had no sooner recovered than it was hit by the economic impact of Covid-19. The country produced more than 140,000 barrels per day in 2020.

Under Déby Chad remained one of the world’s poorest countries, struggling with desertification – epitomised by the drying up of Lake Chad – and the hosting of nearly 500,000 refugees from Sudan, the Central African Republic and Nigeria.

In 2018 the government completed the restructuring of its loan from Glencore, the Anglo-Swiss trading and mining company which acquired Chad’s oil reserves in 2014. The agreement enabled the lowering of the ratio of public debt to GDP.

Among Déby’s several wives, Hinda, whom he married in 2005, was held to be Chad’s First Lady. The president surprised the country in 2012 by marrying Amani, daughter of the notorious Janjaweed Arab militia leader Musa Hilal.

In 2007 Brahim, Déby’s son from an earlier relationship, was found dead in the car park of his block of flats in the Parisian suburb of Courbevoie, having choked to death from being sprayed with chemicals from a fire extinguisher. His father had sacked him as an adviser the previous year after he had been convicted in France for possession of drugs and weapons. His four attackers, who seized about €50,000 from his pockets, were jailed in 2011 for “robbery leading to death without intention to kill”.

Déby’s sons Mahamat, Adam, Abdelkerim and Zakaria, all held prominent positions in the Chadian army, which announced that a military council led by Mahamat, a four-star general, would replace him.

Idriss Déby, born June 18 1952, died April 20 2021