THE United States has called for a peaceful democratic transition of power as military name Idriss Deby’s son Mahamat Idriss Deby president of Chad Republic.
US State Department spokesman Ned Price stated the position of the US in a statement on Tuesday.
“We support a peaceful transition of power in accordance with the Chadian constitution,” he said.
The ICIR had reported how Deby, who just won his sixth re-election as the country’s president, died of injuries suffered on the frontline in battle with rebels in the troubled part of the country, where he had gone to visit soldiers.
The country’s Army spokesman Azem Bermandoa Agouna was quoted to have said in a statement on Tuesday that Deby “breathed his last defending the sovereign nation on the battlefield.”
The Army said Deby had been commanding his army at the weekend, battling against rebels who had launched a major incursion into the north of the country on election day.
The rebel group Front for Change and Concord in Chad (FACT), based across the northern frontier with Libya, attacked a border post in the provinces of Tibesti and Kanem on election day and then advanced hundreds of kilometres south, but suffered a setback over the weekend.
In a move that contradicts Chad’s constitution, Mahamat, a general in the Army, was announced by the military to head a 15-member military council that would lead the country for the next 18 months.
Chad’s constitution requires elections to be held within 90 days in the event the president’s post becomes vacant, while the Speaker of the House of Assembly becomes the president in the interim.
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