Chad

By William E. Smith

The scene was Independence Square in N'Djamena, capital of the war-torn Central African state of Chad, and the crowd of 200,000 was the largest the city had ever seen. Facing the podium from the flatbed of a ten-wheel German truck were 21 Libyan prisoners of war, some of them wounded and all of them disheveled and frightened. For a moment a heavy silence hung over the square. Then, as a great roar rose from the crowd, hundreds of people ran toward the vehicle, throwing sticks and stones. The Libyans cowered to protect themselves against the onslaught, and their guards quickly drove them out of the square to safety.

The presence of the Libyans, captured a few days earlier at Fada in northeastern Chad, proved, if proof were any longer needed, that the soldiers of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi have been fighting on the ground in Chad for a long time, despite the Libyan leader's frequent denials. More important, the prisoners were tangible evidence of the biggest victory of the Chad army since the latest round of fighting began in 1982. Gaddafi responded to the defeat at Fada by dispatching four MiG-23s to bomb the towns of Arada and Oum Chalouba. The raid did little damage, yet it was important because it carried the war south of the 16th parallel. In 1983 France set that line as the point beyond which Libyan military interference would not be tolerated.

France, which ruled Chad in colonial times, is taking the lead for its Western allies in the desert war, while the U.S. is sending weaponry. Over the years Chad (pop. 5.2 million) has suffered from a variety of tribal and political conflicts directed against the government in N'Djamena, which Paris has always backed. At the same time, a force of some 8,000 Libyan troops has been fighting in the north alongside the Chadian rebels.

Three days after the Libyan raid last week, French fighter-bombers struck the Libyan air base at Ouadi-Doum, knocking out an elaborate radar complex. The Libyans were caught by surprise because the French, flying almost at dune level, had escaped radar detection. The following day Libya responded with an aerial attack on the small town of Kouba Olanga, just south of the 16th parallel.

The recent history of Chad has been a contest between two rival northerners, Goukouni Oueddei, who was once the country's President and has more recently been the leader of the northern rebels, and Hissene Habre, once a guerrilla leader and since 1982 the President. Three months ago, while ( visiting the Libyan capital of Tripoli, Goukouni was shot and wounded in the Gaddafi compound under circumstances that have never been explained. He is still in Libya, reportedly under house arrest.

For whatever reason, Gaddafi's break with Goukouni caused most of the Chadian rebels to shift their loyalties from Gaddafi to Habre, thereby fundamentally changing the political role of the Libyan forces in northern Chad. Says a Western diplomat in N'Djamena: "What you have now is an invasion of Chad by Libya." Much of the credit for Chad's recent achievements goes to Habre, a French-trained lawyer who has managed to create a sense of unity in a country that has never known the meaning of the word. Buoyed by these successes, the soft-spoken Habre sounded unusually confident last week when he told his countrymen, "Our objective is to preserve our territorial integrity, and our success is only a matter of time."

With reporting by James Wilde/N''Djamena