Front démocratique pour le renouveau
The Front démocratique pour le renouveau ( FDR , German "Democratic Front for Renewal") was a paramilitary organization active in the east of the Republic of Niger . Sometimes he called himself Front démocratique révolutionnaire (Eng. "Democratic revolutionary front").
Due to the increasing national debt and the decline in foreign aid, economic and political development in the Republic of Niger came to a standstill in the 1990s. Violent protests ensued in several parts of the country, in the capital Niamey and in other cities. While the members of the rebel movements FLAA , UFRA and FARS in the north were Tuareg , the FDR, active in the east, was mainly recruited from the semi-nomadic population of the Tubu . The easy availability of weapons from neighboring Chad encouraged the FDR's armed resistance.
Since then, there have been sporadic clashes between the state security forces and members of the FDR. In July 1998, 15 people were killed in an attack by the FDR on a village in the N'Guigmi arrondissement in the Diffa department . The FDR also took unarmed civilians hostage, including a Canadian social worker who it held captive for four months, according to a report by Amnesty International .
In August 1998, the FDR and Ibrahim Baré Maïnassara's regime finally signed a peace agreement in the Chadian capital of N'Djamena . In previous years, the FDR had refused to agree to a peace agreement like the one concluded by the other Nigerien rebel movements. A truce signed earlier was broken after just two weeks.
In January 1999 a mass grave was discovered on an island in Lake Chad containing 150 Tubu who had been killed more than two months after the August 1998 peace agreement. The Nigerien government initially denied the existence of the mass grave, but later published the names of those killed in the press. The background of the grave was never clarified, even if the FDR asked the Nigerien Ministry of Justice to investigate the events. The execution of unarmed, civilian Tubu by state security forces was also reported in other areas of the FDR.
Web links
- Klaus Schlichte : Niger (FDR) - Armed Conflict . Working group on the causes of war (AKUF) at the University of Hamburg .
Individual evidence
- ↑ BBC News : Niger rebel attack , published July 25, 1998, accessed October 9, 2012.
- ↑ a b Amnesty International : 1998 Annual Report for Niger , accessed October 9, 2012.
- ↑ Klaus Schlichte: Niger (FDR) - Armed Conflict ( Memento of the original from June 10, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . Working Group on Research into the Causes of War (AKUF) at the University of Hamburg, accessed on October 9, 2012.
- ↑ IRIN : NIGER: Opposition demands investigation into massacre , published June 7, 1999, accessed October 9, 2012.
