This is an excerpt from an article taken from our monthly Sahara Focus publication.

Chad’s President Idriss Déby Itno paid a secret visit on 11 July to France’s President Emmanuel Macron at the Elysée Palace. Journalists were only informed one hour before the meeting commenced.

The meeting comes nine days after Macron’s difficult meeting in Bamako on 2 July, where he had to rectify the problem of how he was going to finance the G5 Sahel (G5S) mission. Details of the meeting have not been released, but are said to have been a follow-up to Macron’s Bamako meeting.

Déby’s Chadian troops are a key component of the G5 Force — if it ever gets off the ground — and it is likely that the meeting focused on Chad’s parlous financial state.

In Chad, the youth of the main opposition party, the National Union for Development and Renewal (UNDR), published an open letter on 11 July calling on Western countries, particularly France, to stop all support for ‘the illegal and illegitimate regime of Déby‘ immediately.

On the French side, Macron has also received pressure from civil society groups. The French NGO Survie said that ‘seeing the new French president receive an emblematic dictator of the Francophone two months after his election is a sad signal of continuity with the policy of his predecessors’. Survie went on to say that it believes the ‘dogma of stability, which justifies support for dictators who bleed their countries dry and undermine the efforts of democratic forces, has found a new promoter’ in Macron. Survie says Macron can no longer claim to embody modernity, at least when it comes to diplomatic matters.

French Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Agnès Romatet-Espagne, stressed that ‘Chad is a friend and partner country. We welcome his determined commitment to the fight against terrorism in the Sahel’. She naturally made no mention of Déby’s perpetration of state terrorism in his own country, which France often appears to overlook.   … [article continues] …