Chad Down and Out

By Jill Smolowe

The attack proved swift, brutal and decisive. In just two hours, Chadian soldiers routed Libyan troops from an airfield that had served as Libya's main support base in northern Chad since 1984, the year after Libya invaded its neighbor in force. The exuberant Chadians claimed they had killed 1,269 enemy troops and taken 438 prisoners while losing just 29 soldiers. Chadian officials also said that in the hasty retreat last week from the air base at Ouadi-Doum, the Libyans left behind a trove of Soviet-made equipment, including combat aircraft, tanks and rocket launchers. The defeat, stated a Chadian military communique, enabled government forces a few days later to seize Faya-Largeau, Gaddafi's last major stronghold in Chad. Even before that final blow, some 3,000 Libyans, fighting despondency and a violent sandstorm, had begun retreating north.

The battles at Ouadi-Doum and Faya-Largeau handed Libyan Strongman Colonel Muammar Gaddafi one of the most ignominious defeats of his 18-year rule. State-run Chadian radio hailed the capture of the 12,500-ft. airstrip at Ouadi-Doum as the "beginning of the end of Gaddafi's expansionist dreams." The debacle not only delivered a near fatal blow to Libya's occupation of northern Chad but also damaged Gaddafi's standing at home, where Libyans are already grumbling about a sickly economy that is suffering from the slump in oil prices.

Gaddafi's military campaign began to sag last October, when he had a falling-out with Goukouni Oueddei, a former Chadian President and leader of rebel forces battling the present government. That rupture prompted most of the guerrillas to shift their loyalties from Gaddafi to Chadian President Hissene Habre and his French-backed army. Habre, who received $15 million in U.S. emergency aid late last year, began a major drive against the Libyans in December. The effort paid off one month later, when government forces captured the Libyan base at Fada, in northeastern Chad. According to U.S. and French officials, Libyan forces were busy trying to recapture Fada when the fighting erupted at Ouadi-Doum.

Libya's defeat was caused by more than a logistical gaffe. In recent months France has supplied Chad with Milan antitank missiles (cost: $34,000 each), which have a range of about 2,000 yds. Another factor was the poor morale of the estimated 15,000 Libyan troops in Chad, most of whom are ill trained and poorly paid.

Gaddafi may now find it difficult to hold onto his northern slice of Chad. The expectation is that the retreating troops will make the arduous 500-mile desert trek north to a Libyan base in the Aozou Strip, a 50-mile-wide, mineral-rich area that has been in dispute since World War II. If Habre decides not to push his fight with Gaddafi into the Aozou Strip, Libyans may push Gaddafi to leave the rest of Chad to Habre. But predictions involving the erratic Gaddafi are always risky. Last week, for instance, he threatened to join the Warsaw Pact. The Kremlin was so taken aback by Gaddafi's suggestion that Soviet Foreign Ministry officials refused even to acknowledge that the Libyan leader had uttered the offer.

With reporting by William Dowell/Paris and Scott MacLeod/Cairo