German ambassador expelled from Chad

The German ambassador to Chad, declared persona non grata for "discourteous behaviour", left the country on Saturday evening, Chadian Foreign Minister Mahamat Saleh Annadif told AFP on Sunday.

On Friday, the government of Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno had asked the diplomat to leave the country within 48 hours, for "non-compliance with diplomatic practices".

"The German ambassador to Chad, Jan Christian Gordon Kricke, took the Air France flight on Saturday evening," Annadif told AFP. The information was confirmed to AFP by Aziz Mahamat Saleh, the government spokesman.

The authorities did not officially specify the exact reasons for the expulsion.

But a Chadian government official told AFP anonymously that N'Djamena blamed the diplomat for "interfering too much" in the "governance of the country", as well as "remarks tending to divide the Chadians".

On Friday, an official of the German Foreign Ministry had considered "absolutely not understandable" the reasons for the expulsion of its ambassador, in post since July 2021.

Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, 37, then a young general, was proclaimed president on April 20, 2021, at the head of a junta of 15 generals, after the announcement of the death of the head of state, his father Idriss Déby Itno, killed at the front against rebels after having led this vast Sahelian country with an iron fist for 30 years.

The new strongman of N'Djamena had promised to return power to civilians through "free and democratic elections" after 18 months.

But after this period, he remained in power for two more years, assuring that he would comply with the demands of a "national reconciliation" forum, which had been boycotted by the opposition and the main rebel movements.

The German embassy had joined those of France, Spain and the Netherlands in particular, as well as the EU, to express its "concern" after the extension of the transition.

The main opposition leaders have been in exile or in hiding since the bloody repression of a demonstration against the government on 20 October 2022, which officially left 73 people dead, but many more according to NGOs, which also mention "forced disappearances" and "extrajudicial executions".