Abba Siddick

Abba Siddick is a Muslim Chadian politician and revolutionary born in what was the Oubangui-Chari French colony (today Central African Republic). In passing in Chad (also a French colony then), he entered in active politics in the Chadian Progressive Party (PPT), a nationalist and radical African political party founded in 1947 and led by Gabriel Lisette. By 1958, he had left the PPT to form with others the Chadian National Union (UNT), a Muslim progressive party, but he turned quite early to the PPT and, after the independence of Chad, was minister of Education of the President François Tombalbaye. However the President's discrimination against Muslims in Chad brought him to become a member of the rebel insurgent group FROLINAT, formed in 1966 to oppose the rule of Tombalbaye. After the death of the organization's first secretary-general in 1968, a vicious battle for leadership ensued, which terminated with the victory of Siddick in 1969, even though he was perceived as an Anti-Arab and was suspected of being a moderate leftist and not having any revolutionary apprentiship. He made Tripoli the headquarters of the front; and Libya took the place of Sudan as key supplier of the FROLINAT. While he was internationally recognized as the head of the FROLINAT, he was losing control of the units on the ground. In 1971 he tried to reassert his authority by proposing to unify the insurgent forces active in Chad, but Goukouni Oueddei, head of the Second Liberation Army of the FROLINAT, broke with Siddick, who managed to at least keep a loose control over the First Liberation Army.

Siddick's fragile authority depended much on Libyan support (which was official from 1971) but when in 1973 there was a reapproachment between Libya and Chad and Siddick, he was forced to move his headquarters from Tripoli to Algiers. What nominal control was left over the troops on the ground completely vanished in 1976, when almost all his cadres rebelled against his authority and accused him of never hearing his lieutenants and of never going himself to the field of operations. The rebels, led by Mahamat Abba Saïd, assumed control over most of the First Liberation Army of the FROLINAT, that became known under his leadership simply as the First Army. Two years later, in 1978, he lost even his formal leadership of the movement when in a congress of the FROLINAT held in Faya-Largeau Goukouni was nominated leader.

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