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Chad president says Macron 'in wrong era' over remarks on troop withdrawals
Chad president says Macron 'in wrong era' over remarks on troop withdrawals
by AFP Staff Writers
N'Djamena (AFP) Jan 7, 2025

Chad's president on Tuesday accused Emmanuel Macron of being "in the wrong era" after the French president said African countries "forgot to say thank you" for France's military deployment in the Sahel region to fight an Islamist insurgency.

"I'd like to express my outrage regarding recent remarks by President Macron which border on contempt for Africa and Africans. I think he is in the wrong era," President Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno said in a speech at the presidential palace published on the presidency Facebook page.

France in 2013 began a military operation in Mali and the Sahel region to fight Islamist insurgents.

"I think that they forgot to say 'thank you'. It does not matter, it will come with time," Macron said in a speech to French ambassadors on Monday.

"We did the right thing," he said of the military deployment, adding that "none" of the states of the Sahel region would be "sovereign" today without that intervention.

France is now reconfiguring its military presence in Africa after being driven out of three Sahelian countries governed by juntas hostile to Paris -- Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger.

Senegal and the Ivory Coast have also asked France to leave military bases on their territory.

At the end of November, Chad -- which hosted Paris's last military bases in the Sahel -- ended the defence and security agreements that linked it with the former colonial power, saying they were "obsolete".

Around 1,000 French military personnel were stationed in the country and are in the process of being withdrawn.

Deby, 40, who won a five-year presidential mandate last May in a vote the opposition denounced as fraudulent, said "the decision to end the military cooperation agreement with France is entirely a sovereign decision of Chad.

"There is no ambiguity in this," he said.

Chad capital calm after deadly presidential palace assault
N'Djamena (AFP) Jan 9, 2025 - Chad's capital was calm early on Thursday, the morning after armed men attacked the presidential palace, sparking a battle that killed 19 people, mostly assailants, according to the government.

Beefed-up security and road blocks set up late on Wednesday had been lifted in the area around the presidential palace, where traffic was back to normal, AFP journalists saw.

Heavy gunfire erupted near the presidential complex just before 8:00 pm local time (1900 GMT) on Wednesday in the centre of N'Djamena, the capital of the military-ruled, central African country.

Government spokesman Abderaman Koulamallah said a 24-member commando unit carrying "weapons, machetes and knives" attacked the guards of the presidential palace before being swiftly stopped.

The group was dressed in civilian clothing and came from a poor neighbourhood in the south of the city, he said.

Koulamallah described them as drunken "Pieds Nickeles" -- a reference to a French comic featuring hapless crooks.

He said late on Wednesday that 18 of the assailants were killed and six wounded. A presidential guard had also been killed and three others wounded.

Hours after the shooting, Koulamallah appeared in a video posted on Facebook, surrounded by soldiers and with a gun at his belt, saying: "The situation is completely under control... The destabilisation attempt was put down."

Koulamallah, who is also the foreign minister, told AFP that Chadian President Mahamat Idriss Deby Itno was inside the presidential palace at the time of the attack but gave no more details.

Opposition members have voiced doubts about the government's account of events.

Max Kemkoye, spokesman for the Political Actors' Consultation Group (GCAP), spoke on Thursday of an "unfortunate synopsis" and a "set up" orchestrated by those in power.

The government spokesman said he would make a statement to accredited diplomats later in the day and the prosecutor is also expected to make a statement.

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