History
The city of Abéché was made capital of the Ouaddai Kingdom - Sultanat de Quaddai- in the 1890s, after the wells at Ouara, the former capital, had dried out. In 1909, French troops invaded the Kingdom and established a garrison in Abéché. France took power, forcing the sultan to renounce his throne. At that time, Abéché was the largest city in Chad with 28,000 people, but major epidemics reduced the population to 6000 in 1919. In 1935, the sultanate was restored by orders of the French government, and Muhammed Ouarada, heir to the throne after his father became king. Once one of the strongholds of the Arabic slave trade route, the city is known today for its markets, mosques, church, square (the Place de l'Indépendance) and for its sultan's palace. Abéché has several schools, a hospital, a university and is one of the major garrisons of the Armee Nationale du Tchad ANT . There is a small airport (IATA: AEH, ICAO: FTTC), Airport ID: AE, operated sunrise to sunset (SR-SS) with flights to N'Djaména.
On 25 November 2006, the city was taken by the Union of Forces for Democracy, a rebel group that seeks to depose president Idriss Déby. Extensive looting took place during the night. On the same day, nearby Biltine was captured by the Rally of Democratic Forces, another rebel group. A day later, both cities were retaken by the Chadian army.
On October 30, 2007, the city came to international attention when 17 French volunteers working for the charity Zoé's Ark were arrested there for alleged child abduction.
Abeche is the centrum for the delivery of humanitarian assistance for approx. 240,000 Darfurian refugees living in 12 camps east of the town, in the border region to Sudan. A number of organizations opened office 2003 and 2004, e.g. UNHCR, the Red Cross, the German GTZ and UNICEF.
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“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)
“We aspire to be something more than stupid and timid chattels, pretending to read history and our Bibles, but desecrating every house and every day we breathe in.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)