Ngarlejy Yorongar - Political Career

Political Career

The first of his many politically motivated arrests was in March 1994, when he was detained for five days. Yorongar ran in the June 1996 presidential election and received 2.08% of the popular vote (tenth place) in the first round. On July 3, 1996, he was arrested without a warrant, allegedly beaten, and held without charge for longer than legally permitted. Eventually, he was charged with illegally campaigning for Wadel Abdelkader Kamougué, one of the candidates in the second round of the presidential election, and engaging in arms trafficking with rebels. These charges were subsequently dismissed, and he was released.

Yorongar was elected to the National Assembly as a FAR candidate in the first round of the 1997 parliamentary election. He was the only FAR candidate to obtain a seat in the election.

In an interview in July 1997, he accused Kamougué, who was by this time the President of the National Assembly, of taking a bribe of 15 million French francs from Elf, a partner in the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project. In the previous month, he accused President Idriss Déby of nepotism in the management of the oil industry. Kamougué charged Yorongar with defamation in August, and on May 26, 1998 he was stripped of his parliamentary immunity. He was arrested on June 3. On July 20, after a trial judged unfair by Amnesty International, he was found guilty of defamation and sentenced to three years imprisonment and a fine of 500,000 CFA francs. He was released after eight months of detention on February 5, 1999.

On March 22, 2001 Yorongar, on behalf of 120 Chadians, submitted to the World Bank Inspection Panel a request for inspection of the pipeline project, claiming that people living in the Project area and their environment had or were likely to suffer harm as a result of failures and omissions in the design, appraisal, and supervision by the International Development Association of the Project. Also, the request claimed that proper consultation with and disclosure of information to the local communities was not taking place.

In the presidential election of 2001, in which incumbent Idriss Déby obtained a second mandate, Yorongar came second with 396,864 votes (16.35%). Yorongar and the other opposition candidates hotly contested the fairness of the election; the answer of the government was to arrest them twice, first briefly on May 28 and then on May 30, when they were freed after the intervention of the World Bank's President James Wolfensohn. Yorongar was apparently tortured while in detention, enduring beatings with iron bars on his back. This was confirmed by the Chadian physicians who first treated him after his release.

The following year Yorongar's party participated in the 2002 parliamentary election. The FAR obtained 10 seats, and Yorongar was re-elected to the National Assembly as a FAR candidate from Bebedjia constituency in Logone Oriental Department. Yorongar is currently the President of the Federation Parliamentary Group.

Two years later, in 2004, the Chadian state was shaken by a serious crisis caused by the determination of the President to obtain a third mandate through a reform of the Constitution. When the following year a constitutional referendum to sanction the National Assembly's vote was looming, Yorongar first attempted to have the amendments proclaimed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court; when this failed, he refused to boycott the referendum, unlike the other main opposition parties, and he instead campaigned for a "no" vote. The referendum nevertheless passed according to official results. Yorongar boycotted the May 2006 presidential election, along with most of the opposition, considering it a masquerade intended only to legitimize Dèby's continued rule.

The FAR was the only major opposition party to not sign an agreement on August 13, 2007 that provided for improved electoral organization ahead of the next parliamentary election, now planned for 2009. Yorongar criticized the agreement as inadequate and said that signing it would be a "waste of time". He said that there should instead be a dialogue involving the entire political scene, including rebels, the exiled opposition, and civil society, and that a credible election could not be conducted while a rebellion was taking place in part of the country. Yorongar was also critical of the fact that the independent electoral commission would be subject to the decisions of the Constitutional Council, which he alleged is controlled by Déby, and of the management of the electoral census by the government instead of the electoral commission.