Touring Pontiff Appeals for Reconciliation in Troubled Chad

Pope John Paul II, unfazed by the rigors of his hot and dusty journey through poorest Africa, pleaded here Tuesday for national reconciliation in a country inured to war and misery.

Heavily armed soldiers in armored cars outnumbered roadside onlookers as the papal cavalcade swept into N’Djamena, the capital of a country that has suffered a generation of civil war and a decade of struggle with neighboring Libya since becoming independent from France in 1960.

Chad, one of the world’s 10 poorest countries, was the fifth and last stop on an eight-day journey that the Pope hopes will alert the outside world to Africa’s plight.

“I know your courageous resistance to adversity and your determination to seek development, unity and peace through national conciliation,” John Paul said at an airport welcoming ceremony that featured an army band playing “Marching Through Georgia.”

“Your country has known much suffering: suffering from drought and from famine, suffering caused by painful years of war and recently by an air catastrophe,” the Pope said, referring to the terrorist bombing of a French airliner last Sept. 19 that claimed 171 lives.

Chad has 5 million people and is four times the size of Arizona. Per-capita income is around $150 a year, and about 85% of the people are subsistence farmers. Only one-fourth of the children are in school. Life expectancy is barely 40 years.

Ethnic, racial and tribal rivalries between the Arab, Muslim north and the black, largely Christian south have triggered intermittent civil war for 25 years.

For more than a decade, Chad has battled Libyan occupiers in what is thought to be a mineral-rich area on the frontier between the two countries. The fighting largely ended in 1987, but the Chadian government, which still holds more than 1,000 Libyan prisoners, says the war continues.

President Hissen Habre, a former guerrilla who won power in 1982, survived an assassination attempt last year and is currently opposed by Libyan-supported insurgents operating from neighboring Sudan.

Still, by local standards, the current level of violence is minimal. About 1,300 French troops help enforce a tenuous peace with Libya.

In an address at the N’Djamena Cathedral, recently rebuilt after being destroyed by fighting in 1980, the Pope applauded Chad’s efforts at nation-building.

“After its testing, your country has openly embarked on a road of regeneration,” he said. “Generously, and with great dynamism, the Chadian people have started down the road of unity and peace.”

The Pope will tour cities in southern Chad today and return to Rome on Thursday to end the 45th foreign trip of his 11-year reign.