What will remain of a history built on gross lies and prejudices? One penny question that deserves to be asked!
We all know that the North-South opposition is primarily an ideological construction based on falsehoods and prejudices, with the aim of dividing and mobilizing.
We know that the country inherited from the colonizer an embryonic administration, little or badly trained, without great means to validly manage such a vast territory and little developed in infrastructure.
And that it was often easy to stigmatize and demonize whole groups in the face of ignorant crowds and make them believe that the enemies are those other people.
We all know how these manipulations had caused harm and made many innocent victims, transforming vagabonds into fearsome torturers during the past four decades.
We are well aware that each large population group has its own black notebook containing the dates and the most painful memories, kept to nourish more hatred, revanchist hints often based on rumors and fears and not on a restitution of the truth.
It is thanks to all this that some were able to access power and privileges before being driven out by others and so on. It is therefore necessary to understand why any process of overhaul and genuine reconciliation ends in fishtails!
When one is from the South, one must know one's place, one's limits, one's status and not try to understand or question. Likewise when you are from the North, you have to accept that it must happen like that without asking questions, for better or for worse.
And when the Chadians get together, very experienced influencers are there to remind them that there are taboos, subjects taught in families and communities but which should never be discussed in public otherwise it will explode!
Unfortunately, it is in these taboo subjects that the roots of the evils that have ravaged the country have always resided.
Except that some live, reign and profit thanks to the persistence of these taboos: they have hard-hitting formulas to play on ignorance and fear and manipulate entire populations like super-sorcerers! Those who try to question this order of lies, prejudices and profitable discriminations, must be eliminated purely and simply!
In the 90s, while we were establishing the movement for the defense of human rights, a deep undermining work was undertaken by these powerful circles with the compatriots of the North to make them believe that we were only fighting for the return of the southerners in power, so any northerner who enlists is a traitor!
In the same order, the compatriots of the North were forbidden to create strong political and civil associations, and had the obligation to follow a single northern leadership to prevent the southerners from returning to power thanks to transparent democratic games! Some have paid with their lives for refusing to comply with this deception!
But the northern part of the country having never been under the exclusive control of a clan, it was necessary to develop the principle of sharing ministries and institutions to make the compatriots of the North believe that they had their accounts and that they should do everything to avoid a mass return of those from the South to the key cogs of the state and the DSF (Ndlr : Defense and Security Forces).
By skilfully manipulating the tactic of the bone stretched to the dog at the end of a rope in exchange for its servility, the system succeeded in wrapping the great southern executives in fratricidal struggles to tear the bone: region against region, parents against parents, as soon as some, after ridiculous turpitudes, manage to touch the bone, the supreme manipulator hands it to others and bidding and quarrels are going well!
However, each time the question of the alternation in power is posed, it emerges in the networks of manipulation to the northerners that the southerners would be their dangerous enemies who would only wait for the return to power to take revenge and drive out or demote the northerners! Surely this machine worthy of a Ku-Klux-Klan will run at full capacity in view of the next referendum?
But let's see the gross lies that this neo-Nazi ideology contains:
- of the 7 Presidents who have led the country, there have only been 2 southerners for a total of 20 years out of the 62 since 1960,
- these two southern presidents came to power through institutional processes: the first was elected, the second succeeded the first in the same republican institutions.
- for all the others, everyone arrived with the support of an armed militia and by war or acts of war.
- it is impossible today for a leader of the South to come to power in Chad by the same Darfurian method: even in a terrible civil war, the southerners are not ready to want to conquer and enslave their fellow northerners by arms!
- beyond resolving the damaging question of citizenship, justice and equality, most southerners are committed to the institutional conception of power and reject the warrior conception introduced more than four decades ago.
- no political leader from the South is more interested in the problems of difficult cohabitation in the North to allow himself to indulge in a so-called revenge against the northerners in favor of power.
- on the contrary, any southern political leader, knowing the security vulnerability of power in Ndjamena in relation to the usual threats coming from the North or the East, will do everything to rely more on northern civilian and military cadres to stabilize the territory.
- Moreover, it is impossible for a southerner, who has come to power through the ballot box, to arm his clan or his tribe to surround himself with them for the sole purpose of confiscating power and its privileges.
- on the cultural and religious level, the majority of southerners are taught in forgiveness and are not ready for vendettas and rezzous against other populations.
- in the Chad of 2023, all regions have enough executives and young people in training and connected to the 21st century to see Chad other than through the prism of regionalism and unjustified divisions on which some of the elites would still like to surf to his petty interests.
- in reality, it is the nature of the power and its mode of accession and conservation which are the heart of the problem and not the origin of the one who will lead the country.
If the processes of dialogue and the search for solutions were sincere and inclusive, if the stubbornness of the tenors of the current power in rejecting any alternation did not guide the backstage of the transition, regardless of who would come to power by the will of the majority of Chadians: he and his supporters will be forced to govern differently from what we have seen so far!
A power resulting from such legitimacy would respect the Constitution, laws, democratic principles, justice and equality among all Chadians, having been the subject of a real consensus. There will be no need to repress, oppress, plunder, kill and burn to wield such power.
DSFs and institutions will reflect diversity and equity. Citizens will respect public order voluntarily because it is legitimate. There will be none of the things that make Chadians cry and groan now and each region will live in peace and develop harmoniously. Citizens could even be elected in regions from which they do not originate, thanks to their qualities and programs. Etc.
Only, everything that has just been said here is too difficult to understand and assimilate, both by the supporters of the ideology of north-south division and by many Chadians who have been poisoned despite themselves by the ravages of this ideology. neo-Nazi.
In addition to the fact that this would definitively free Chad from this status of tank carrier of Françafrique and cross-border mercenaries, to become truly independent, sovereign and prosperous: this perspective will be vigorously fought by the external sponsors of the division and enslavement of Chadians!
Fortunately, there is always hope, as a compatriot and friend from the North in exile told me for his opinions: "In fact these are people who owe everything to the regime: illiterate people bombarded by generals, governors and I don't know what else and who defend their beefsteak. These people do not represent the North. The northerners make the difference between individuals who defend their selfish interests and the interests of the regions. In this respect, we are all housed in the same boat. And maybe even the North is more compromised than the South in its future, not to mention that its children are killed to defend the indefensible. I am personally more afraid that people from other regions put all the people of the north in the same basket. This is what is likely to happen." (end of quote)
And it is this difficulty in curing this instilled evil, this maintained obscurantism, which will make the expected changes still require blood, sweat and tears...
But if all true patriots and in good faith rise up everywhere to refuse collective alienation, the country will be saved and restored sooner and faster than some might believe!
By Enoch DJONDANG
*This article has been translated from French into English by Marcus Boni Teiga
