Chadian authorities on Tuesday (November 15) insisted they had the situation under control a day after attacks on military camps in and outside the capital, N'djamena, that left at least two of the gunmen dead and 15 under arrest. "The city is calm. People have returned to work as normal," Communications Minister Hourmadji Moussa Doumgor told IRIN from the capital. In the early hours of Monday, a score of armed men in civilian dress attacked an army training centre about 25 kilometres south of N'djamena, while a dozen assailants staged an attack against the National Guard and Nomad Camp in the capital, the government announced Monday evening.

Senegal has arrested the former Chadian dictator, Hissène Habré, on an international arrest warrant from Belgium for atrocities committed during his eight-year rule. The Senegalese government must now fulfill its international legal obligations to extradite Habré to face trial in Belgium, Human Rights Watch said. Habré was arrested, taken to jail, then brought before a prosecutor to be questioned and then transferred to the penitentiary wing of a hospital in the Senegalese capital Dakar, where he has lived in exile since 1990. On September 19, a Belgian judge issued an international arrest warrant for Habré under Belgium's "universal jurisdiction" law, which allowed prosecution of the worst atrocities no matter where they were committed.

Chad's government said on Tuesday it had agreed a bill to put before parliament changing a law which safeguards oil profits for future generations, despite objections from the World Bank. The original law, agreed with the global lender, has been touted as a test case in Africa to show petro-dollars can help the poor, with 10 percent of oil revenues meant to be saved in a special overseas fund to fight poverty in the long term.

Humanitarian groups assisting Sudanese refugees in eastern Chad have redeployed staff to camps in the Hadjer Hadid area despite a breakdown in talks between army deserters and the government. UNHCR and other aid groups a few days ago cut back their presence amid tension in the region, where the government said dozens of deserters had fled.

Corruption is on the rise in some rich countries as well as poorer ones, research by anti-corruption watchdog Transparency International suggests. The group's Corruption Perceptions Index labels Bangladesh and Chad as the most corrupt places on the planet. TI's survey asks businesspeople, academics and public officials about how countries they live in or do business with are perceived.

Thousands of "forgotten refugees" who fled banditry in Central African Republic are running out of food in camps in neighbouring Chad, the World Food Programme (WFP) said. Some 11,000 refugees have poured into arid southern Chad since armed gangs began storming villages across the border in Central African Republic in June, shooting randomly, looting homes and terrorising their inhabitants.

A Belgian judge has issued an international arrest warrant charging Chad’s exiled former president, Hissène Habré, with human rights crimes committed during his 1982-1990 rule. Habré lives in exile in Senegal, where he was indicted over five years ago before courts ruled that he could not be tried there. The Belgian warrant marks a turning point in the long effort to bring Habré to justice, and should lead to his extradition from Senegal to Belgium to stand trial.

Several hundred refugees from the Central African Republic (CAR) have crossed the border in the last few days. UNHCR believes that 150 to 200 persons are currently present in Komba village. The local authorities, however, are reporting that a total of 467 people crossed the border last week following an attack on Markounda in northern CAR on 27 September. Other inhabitants from Markounda apparently fled elsewhere in northern CAR.

A group of unidentified armed men in military uniform crossed into Chad from Sudan early on Monday, killing 36 herders and stealing livestock, the Chadian government said. In a statement on Tuesday, the government said the attack took place in the village of Madayouna in the Ouaddai region of eastern Chad. "The riposte by the armed forces stationed in the region was rapid," the statement said. Seven of the assailants were killed and eight detained, one of whom later died in detention, it added. Two Chadian soldiers were killed and five injured.

Reporters Without Borders has welcomed the N’Djaména appeal court’s decision to provisionally release Samory Ngaradoumbé, the editorial coordinator of the privately-owned weekly L’Observateur, pending an appeal hearing on 22 September. He had been serving a three-month prison sentence since 18 July. "It is an encouraging sign to see Samory Ngaradoumbé walk out of prison, even if we have had to wait nearly two months for it," the press freedom organisation said. "The court granted him the right to remain free until his appeal hearing, a right that should be accorded to all of the journalists imprisoned in Chad."

While many of the girls in the 11-18 year age group share most of the same duties as their mothers, one major difference is that many of the girls are in school for the first time. This is an opportunity they would not have had in Darfur and which their mothers never had. Among the recommendations given are that NGOs and UN agencies need to keep pushing for girls and young women to take part in decision-making in camp management, and that all health care providers should immediately establish and implement care for the survivors of violence following established protocols.

Oil firms and African states have been accused of "contracting out" of their human rights obligations in Africa's biggest investment project. The Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline contract may impair the countries' ability to protect farmers, fishermen and others affected, Amnesty International says.

Until a few weeks ago, the population at Amboko was just under 14,000, but since violence broke out in CAR in early June, more than 8,000 new refugees have arrived. In total, there are now more than 40,000 refugees in this part of Chad. It is unclear who is behind the violence that is making people flee their homes. But all the refugees tell a very similar story: unidentified groups of armed men are storming villages in the far north of CAR, shooting randomly, looting homes and terrorising villagers.

Journalist Michaël Didama, speaking from his prison cell in the Chadian capital N'Djamena, denounced his detention as illegal and called on local and international journalists to keep up pressure for the release of all four reporters jailed by the government since July.
"This is a crackdown on the press. There is nothing legal about our arrests," Didama told the Committee to Protect Journalists in a telephone interview. Didama has been in the capital's overcrowded Central Prison since August 8. He was sentenced to six months in jail after his newspaper in May, 2005, covered rebel groups and an alleged massacre of civilians in eastern Chad.

The Chadian government has declared that it will remove all the accomplices of Chad’s former dictator, Hissène Habré (1982-1990), from government jobs in the central African country, Human Rights Watch said in an August press release. The Chadian government’s announcement was made in a letter from Prime Minister Pascal Yoadimnadji to Human Rights Watch and follows a July report by Human Rights Watch naming 41 leading Habré-era figures, many accused of torture and killings, who still held key posts in Chad.

With a population of more than 8 million, Chad has around 3,600 health workers: 50 percent of these are unskilled, and 35 percent are nurses and midwives. Chad also faces geographical imbalances in the distribution of health professionals, with approximately half working in the capital N'Djamena. Massive shortages of qualified health workers are recognised by the Chad authorities to be a primary bottleneck for the development of the health sector. Policies have been implemented which prioritise human resource development. However, more coherent policies are needed, particularly to improve motivation and retention.

More than 2,000 Central Africans have fled over the border into Chad in the past two weeks to escape village raids and some have reported seeing young girls raped during the attacks, a UN official said on Tuesday. George Menze, who works for the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) in the southern Chadian town of Gore, said refugees had told officials about men breaking into their homes, pillaging food, stealing livestock and raping girls.

With rainy season floods just days away, UNHCR is scrambling to relocate some 10,000 refugees from the troubled Central African Republic (CAR) who recently arrived in several villages in remote southern Chad. The refugees, many of whom fled fighting in the CAR in early June with nothing but the clothes on their backs, are currently scattered among 17 villages near the Chadian town of Gore.

More than 8,000 people have fled from the Central African Republic (CAR) into southern Chad over the past fortnight to escape a new outbreak of fighting in the northwest of the country, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) said on Wednesday. The new arrivals joined 30,000 other CAR refugees who have been living in exile in southern Chad for almost three years, UNHCR official Bernard Ntwari told IRIN by telephone from N'Djamena. He said the latest exodus began following clashes between government troops and a rebel group that began on 3 June.

Chadian President Idriss Deby is expected to be cleared to stand for a third term after a referendum next week but diplomats, human rights activists and opposition parties have already alleged massive fraud and say the result has been fixed in advance. The people in this arid land-locked country will vote on Monday on whether to abolish the constitutional clause that stipulates that a president can only be re-elected once. Deby's second term in office is set to expire in 2006.