The African nation of Chad has publicly murdered a key opposition leader in advance of sham elections that will reelect its dictator, Mahamat Déby. He is the son of long-time dictator Idriss Déby, who ruled Chad with an iron fist for more than 30 years. In the African Union, people see this as the assassination it was. But U.S. media organs like the New York Times, acting like obedient stenographers for foreign dictators, are repeating the Chadian government’s spin that the opposition leader was killed in a “gun battle,” which is absurd as claiming that Russian dissident Andre Navalny died of “sudden death syndrome,” when in fact he was murdered by Russia’s Putin regime.
As a professor and writer for The Atlantic notes, “The asymmetry in how political events are covered based on where they occur is glaring; in Chad, a key opposition leader was murdered by soldiers who brazenly sprayed his party headquarters with bullets. It will barely get covered in most global newspapers because it’s in Africa.”
The New York Times’ gullible depiction of this as a “gun battle” is absurd, because a gun battle doesn’t involve a hail of bullets being sprayed at civilians by well-armed troops.
Chad has been afflicted with devastating civil wars in the past, and is an ethnically-fragmented society, so if Déby were a more benevolent dictator, the U.S. would be justified in supporting him to maintain order, and fight Islamist insurgencies in neighboring countries. Under Déby’s father Idriss, Chad helped stabilize neighboring countries, fought Boko Haram, and reduced bloodshed in countries like the Central African Republic, so Idriss was perhaps a necessary evil.
But his son, the current dictator, Mahamat Déby is a brazen thief and killer. Under his rule, Chad — which has received lots of U.S. aid — seized the Chadian assets of the American oil company Exxon, whose production of oil was the main revenue source and source of export revenue for Chad, nationalizing billions of dollars in assets without compensation. Dictators who steal American assets and murder their political opponents should not get any U.S. aid.
Mahamat Déby has also destabilized neighboring Sudan, allowing the United Arab Emirates to set up a base in northern Chad to help the genocidal Rapid Support Forces (RSF) take over the neighboring country of Sudan. The RSF have slaughtered members of Sudan’s Masalit ethnic group, looted much of the country, raped many women, enslaved many African men to serve as farm laborers or domestic servants, and enslaved many women to be sex slaves.
Mahamat Déby’s regime tortured many students who protested for democracy and killed some of them.
Reporters in foreign countries have often ignored atrocities committed by the governments in those countries, to curry favor with those oppressive regimes. In the 1930s, the New York Times concealed the “terror famine,” in which the Russian communist dictator Joseph Stalin deliberately starved to death at least three million Ukrainians. The Times denied any famine was occurring, and its correspondent, Walter Duranty, wrote glowing reports about bountiful harvests, while receiving expensive gifts from the Russian government.
