Chad rebel leader hails peace deal
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N'DJAMENA, Chad (Reuters) -- A leader of Chad's northern rebellion has flown back to the capital of N'Djamena for the first time in five years and hailed a new peace deal reached at talks in Burkina Faso, which his hard-line comrades were absent from.
"I am coming back to Chad, to my friends, my family. I am glad to be here," Gen. Adoum Togoi said after touching down at N'Djamena airport late Sunday. "There is nothing more important and bigger for Chadians than peace."
Togoi headed a delegation from the Movement for Democracy and Justice in Chad at the peace talks and signed a deal with President Idriss Deby's government on an immediate cease-fire, amnesty and re-integration of rebels.
For Togoi the deal marked the end of five years spent in hiding in Chad's remote north or in exile abroad.
But a hard-line wing of the MDJT, led by its military chief of staff Hassane Mardigue, stayed away from the Burkina talks.
Since former Defense Minister Youssouf Togoimi took up arms against Deby in 1998, fighting has waxed and waned in Chad's northern Tibesti region, which boasts the highest mountains in the Sahara desert.
Togoimi died in a Libyan hospital in September 2002, a few days after his vehicle hit a land mine in northern Chad.
Past peace deals have failed to stop the fighting, although the rebellion has shown little sign of spreading to other areas.
Nevertheless, the sporadic fighting has been a thorn in Deby's side as his dirt-poor country starts to reap the benefits of a major oil project led by ExxonMobil, which started pumping crude from southern Chad in mid-2003.
Copyright 2003
Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
