Huge toll in Chad fighting

Press, 11 April 1979, Page 9

Huge toll in Chad fighting

NZPA-Reuter N’Djamena At least 10,000 people, mostly members of the local Muslim minority, were murdered in the recent flare-up of tribal violence in southern Chad, reliable missionary sources have reported" in the capital, N’Djamena.

I The killings — probably the biggest tribal slaughter in Africa since the 1972 extermination of an estimated 100,000 members of Burundi’s Hutu tribe — resumed in outlying villages at the week-end after several weeks of calm, according to the sources. There were no estimates of the number of deaths in the latest incidents. The violence in Chad’s denselypopulated but remote southern provinces has been directed largely against the Muslim minority, which holds a virtual monopoly of the retail trade and moneylending in the area. Most of the population in southern Chad is Christian or Animist, although Muslims probably form an over-, all majority in the vast landlocked nation. Jesuit missionarv sources said a careful check of each mission station, including those in the smallest isolated villages, had shown that between 4000 and 5000 people had been massacred by anti-Muslim mobs in Moyen-Chari province and up to 6000 others in West Logone province, between late February and midMafch. Many others had died since the count was taken, the sources said. Ih many cases, southern members of the army and police were said to have participated in the murders.