Minister denies forced recruitment into army

A senior Chadian government official has denied accusations that a recent spate of arrests was carried out to force people into the military as tensions mount in the country. Human rights activists and political opponents have said that police have been carrying out the raids to get young new recruits for an army that has been hit by desertions. The opposition says hundreds of soldiers have defected since October, and last week rebel leaders said a number of factions were working to form a unified front to bring down President Idriss Deby. Abderamane Djasnabaille, the minister for parliamentary affairs and human rights, said the recent arrests had nothing to do with military recruitment, and that the government was hiring young people for the armed forces through the normal official channels. “There are some malicious people trying to distort the facts, saying that we are rounding up your children to bring them to the front,” Djasnabaille told state radio. “It is not true. If it were true, we would denounce it.” However, he did admit that police had assaulted some people and wrongfully detained some whose identity papers were in order. “It is true that some people were assaulted by security forces,” Djasnabaille told IRIN on Friday from N’djamena. The government’s line is cutting no ice with human rights activists and opposition leaders who say the wave of arrests beginning in late December resembles forcible recruitment of a type the beleaguered country has seen in the past. “This is manifestly forced recruitment,” said Ibni Oumar Mahamat Saleh, president of the Coalition of Political Parties for the Defence of the Constitution, adding that a similar pattern emerged in 2002 when a rebellion heated up in Tibesti in the north of the country. Jacqueline Moundeina, a lawyer and head of the Chadian Association for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights, agreed. “Whenever a rebellion heats up in Chad, these raids and arrests follow,” she said. “This is not the first time we’ve seen this….This is not a question of the police ensuring security. These youths are being rounded up to be sent to die on the front lines.” Sources in N’djamena say during the last week of December, security forces conducted raids throughout the capital, arresting young men seemingly at random. Saleh said there have been witness reports of people being arrested in their homes. Twenty-three-year-old Abdoulaye Moustapha says he was carrying out his normal business selling kola nuts at New Year's Eve gatherings when a group of police stopped him. “They put me in a pick-up that was already full of young men,” he told IRIN. “They didn’t even ask for our identity papers. We were locked up at the National Police School – hundreds of us.” Police director general Moussa Haroun Tirgo told reporters this week that officials rounded up at least 300 people in the wave of arrests, which he said were carried out strictly to stop criminals in N’djamena.