Ibrahim Abatcha - Creation of The FROLINAT

Creation of The FROLINAT

This union was attained during the congress at Nyala between June 19 and June 22, 1966 by which the UNT and another rebel force, the Liberation Front of Chad (FLT), giving origin to the FROLINAT, whose first secretary-general was proclaimed Abatcha. The two groups were ideologically ill-fitted, as they combined the radicalism of the UNT and the Muslim confessionalism of the FLT. FLT's president, Ahmed Hassan Musa, missed the conference because in jail in Khartoum; Musa suspected with some reason that Abatcha had deliberately chosen the moment of his imprisonment to organize the conference due to his fear of FLT's numerical superiority over the UNT. As a result, once freed Musa broke with the FROLINAT, the first of many splits that were to plague the history of the organization. Thus it must not be found surprising that Abatcha had to face from the beginning a level of considerable internal strife, with the opposition guided by the anti-communist Mohamed Baghlani.

The unity was stronger on the field, with Abatcha and his so-called Koreans passing to Eastern Chad in mid-1966 to fight the government, and El Hadj Issaka assuming the role of his chief-of-staff. While his maquis were badly trained and equipped, they were able to commit some hit-and-run attacks against the Chadian army, mainly in Ouaddai, but also in Guera and Salamat. The rebels also toured the villages, indoctrinating the people on the future revolution and exhorting youths to join the FROLINAT forces.

The following year Abatcha expanded his range and number of operations, officially claiming in his dispatches 32 actions, involving prefectures yet untouched by the rebellion, that is Moyen-Chari and Kanem. Mainly due to Abatcha's qualities as both secretary-general and field-commander, what had started in 1965 as a peasant uprising was becoming a revolutionary movement.

On January 20, 1968 his men killed on the Goz Beida-Abéché road a Spanish veterinary and a French doctor, while they took hostage a French nurse. Abatcha disavowed this action and ordered to free the nurse, but precisely in these circumstances, on February 11, he was tracked down by the Chadian army and killed in a clash.

Abatcha's death was the end of an important phase in the history of the FROLINAT and more generally of the rebellion. Abatcha had been the one generally acceptable leader of the insurrection; after him the FROLINAT will be more and more divided by inner rivalries, making it hardly possible to provide the insurgents with a coherent organization.