Chad teachers strike against dictator Deby

This video is called Bodies, Debris Litter Chad‘s Capital, N’Djamena.

From IRIN:

Chad: Prices Hike, Teachers Strike

17 February 2010

N’djamena — Teachers demanding more pay to face higher food prices entered the third day of a nationwide strike. The government has called their demands “illegal” and “unjustified”, because the “high cost of living is a general problem that does not concern only [the teachers’ union]”, said Employment Minister Fatimé Tchombi.

Primary school teacher Aubin Golmbaye told IRIN his US$200 monthly salary was not enough to feed his family. “In addition to food I need to pay for the house, medical care, school fees – even if I spend $4 a day on food, what would I have left for our other needs, and transport to get to work?” …

Poor families, who often barter livestock for other foodstuffs, find that their animals are buying them less. High prices and below-normal pastoral income due to disease and animal malnutrition are depleting what little food stock families saved from the last growing season, and “steep” food price hikes, starting in April, were predicted in FEWS NET‘s most recent report on food security in Chad. …

Among primary school-age children, 30 percent of girls are enrolled and 40 percent of boys; by the time they reach secondary school, only five percent of girls and 13 percent of boys in that age group still attend school.

What this IRIN report does not mention is that Chad is a bloody dictatorship.

You don’t read much about that in the corporate mainstream media. As Chad’s dictator Idriss Deby is “pro Western“, pro capitalist, and a crony of French President Sarkozy.

I bet hunger is not the same problem for Employment Minister Fatimé Tchombi and the rest of the dictatorship’s ruling clique as for the teachers and the rest of the people of Chad.

Chad update April 2011: here.

On November 8, 1910, a force of some 600 French officers and their Senegalese tirailleurs suffered a defeat in the Battle of Doroté in eastern Chad at the hands of an estimated 5,000 African soldiers of the sultanate of Quaddai, who were armed with rifles. After the battle, the Quaddai forces retreated to British-held Sudan: here.

The most brutal U.S.-backed dictator you’ve never heard of – Hissène Habré of Chad – is facing a trial before a unique court set up in his Senegalese exile: here.

Nicholas Sarkozy’s siren cries to the far-right ahead of France’s regional elections: here.

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• Items from Chad: N’djamena Mayor Arrested, Public Sector Workers’ Strike Continues (sahelblog.wordpress.com)