Chad's president, Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, suspended a senior army commander on Saturday and removed local administrators, saying the commander had failed to enforce orders to disarm two communities whose dispute over water and pasture was about to turn into open fighting. He also told the elite force that guards the presidency to disarm civilians in the area.
The decisions came within 15 minutes of his arrival at Torboul, in Ennedi Ouest province, at the start of a security tour, the state news agency ATPE reported. The provincial government delegate described a conflict “brewing around pasture and access to water” that was “about to degenerate into a pitched battle”, the presidency said, as quoted by the newspaper Le Pays.
General Hamoda Mahamat Béchir, who commands defence zone 8 and is military coordinator for neighbouring Ennedi Est province, then spoke. The presidency says the president found “shortcomings on his part in relation to the instructions given to disarm the two parties”, along with the “nonchalance” of some administrative authorities, and suspended him on the spot; his deputy takes over. Local administrators, including the prefect of Torboul, were removed. The failure is the presidency's allegation, and neither report carries the officials' side.
The disarmament task went to General Tahir Erda Tahiro, head of the DGSSIE, the General Directorate of Security Services of State Institutions. ATPE described it in August as an elite force attached to the presidency, whose mission is to protect the head of state and state institutions; its commander said it intervenes only in exceptional situations, such as unrest turning violent or into rebellion. The job of disarming civilians has therefore moved from the army's local command, accused of not carrying out earlier instructions, to a unit attached to the presidency.
The president cast the dismissals as a question of loyalty. “Here, one serves the State, one obeys the orders of one's hierarchy and does not follow one's community. The State is impersonal,” both outlets quote him as saying.
Chad has tried similar remedies before, in other regions. In a 2024 study of farmer-herder violence in southern and central Chad, the International Crisis Group found that the government had responded with quick ministerial visits and the removal of officials from trouble spots, and that a joint disarmament body set up in 2021 had seized about 6,000 weapons nationwide without curbing the violence. It also found growing mistrust had made all sides more reluctant to disarm. In one central district, Mangalmé, the governor and the head of the gendarmerie were dismissed in March 2023, and clashes resumed in June. That experience concerns different provinces and says nothing about what will happen at Torboul, but it shows what sanctions and weapons collection do not by themselves settle.
Water is the flashpoint elsewhere in Chad too. DW reported on 5 November that at least 25 farmers and herders had been killed less than a week earlier in a clash around a water point in the south-west.
Collecting weapons does not itself settle either community’s access to water or pasture. The reports say nothing about an arrangement for sharing them, and that is the question the order leaves open.