Shattered Truce

"N'Djamena is finished"

For Chad, the scene was all too familiar. Cannon and machine-gun fire echoed through the streets of N'Djamena, the dusty riverside capital of the north-central African nation. Days of violent combat turned the city, which once had a population of 193,000, into a smoke-shrouded battlefield. By week's end, in spite of two abortive ceasefires, hundreds were dead, many of them civilians caught in the crossfire. Some 600 foreigners, including U.S. Ambassador Donald Norland, and up to 30,000 of Chad's 4.5 million people had fled the war-torn country. In the capital, entire city blocks lay in ruins. Said one shaken Frenchman on arriving in neighboring Cameroon: "N'Djamena is finished."

So ended an uneasy truce between warring guerrilla armies. The principal antagonists are two rival leaders who are members of Chad's own central government: President Goukouni Oueddei and Defense Minister Hissene Habre. The two ex-soldiers once fought as Muslim allies during the country's 14-year civil war. Now they are locked in a personal power struggle, with their respective forces (Oueddei's 6,800; Habre's 5,000) shelling each other's urban strongholds.

Armed largely by Libya's Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the northern-based Muslim guerrillas had succeeded last March in ousting President Felix Malloum, one of the southern Christians who have monopolized the government since Chad received its independence from France in 1960. Muslim Leaders Oueddei and Habre have since shared power in an eleven-faction alliance marked by mutual suspicion and hostility.

Chad's warring leaders not only are locked in a power struggle, but also are seen as proxies of two foreign nations with rival interests throughout Africa: the sophisticated, Paris-educated Habre is associated with the French, while the ascetic revolutionary Oueddei is presumed to be close to the Libyans.

Last August all eleven factions met in the Nigerian capital of Lagos to attempt to reach agreement, and they established a fragile government of national unity. But the new coalition government has barely functioned since its inauguration. Last week the Lagos truce appeared to have been irrevocably shattered.

Amid the turmoil, there was more than one cause for Western concern. Not only is Chad a mineral-rich source of potential instability in the very heart of Africa, but the backer of one key rebel faction, Libya's Gaddafi, is a onetime protege of the Soviet Union and a troublemaking champion of Islamic radicalism throughout the region.

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