Security Council hears Chad complaint against Libya, takes no action.

• Position: Column

At a meeting on 19 November, the Security Council considered a complaint from Chad regarding the "serious" situation prevailing in that country, "the northern part of which has been occupied by neighbouring Libya".

Seven speakers participated in the debate. The Council adjourned without a draft resolution having been tabled.

Mahamat Ali Adoum (Chad) said in a 14 November letter to the Council President (S/18456) that in addition to the "flagrant and inadmissible occupation" of 550,000 square kilometres of Chad's northern region, "perpetual interference" in Chad's internal and external affairs, and "repeated acts of aggression, destabilization and terrorism" in Chad, "the terrorist and expansionist Tripoli regime" had escalated. the war by "embarking on a systematic and collective massacre of the innocent civilian populations in the occupied zone".

In a 13 November memorandum annexed to the letter, Chad claimed that people in the "occupied zone" the Prefecture of Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti - had "risen up against the occupier". Libya's reaction had been "brutal and savage", it stated. There had been "collective massacres" "populations" had been deported: palm plantations had been set on fire, and cattle had been decimated. The area was a "wasteland". Those who had managed to escape from "this hell" had found temporary refuge in the mountains, but they were doomed to slow death there - from hunger, thirst and exposure and from the "manhunt carried on by the occupier", Chad said.

Those "barbarous, savage and genocidal crimes" of the "Libyan occupier against the defenceless civillan populations" had led Chad to bring the serious situation before the international community so that it could exercise pressure on the Libyan regime "to induce it to call a halt and to withdraw its occupation troops from Chadian territory without delay", it concluded.

Debate

Mr. Adoum (Chad) said his country was still suffering from "all the subversive, destabilizing machinations, acts of aggression and expansionist designs of the terrorist Colonel Qaddafi". But Chadian patriots, under President Hissein Habre's enlightened leadership, were struggling to defend their homeland. The Libyan army was committing "indescribable atrocities" in northern Chad. For several weeks civilians of Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti had been the innocent targets of "Qaddafi's Terrorist regime". Attacking on land and from the air, the occupation forces had indiscriminately destroyed, by intensive...