ADF STAFF
Sitting in the ochre dirt courtyard of her home in Pala in southwest Chad, Béatrice Naguita stared blankly into the distance as she recounted her April 2023 ordeal.
“Around 1:00 a.m., armed men came into my father’s house and abducted us with my cousin,” the 22-year-old student told Agence France-Presse. “For two weeks as captives in the brush, while my father got together the sum demanded, we were tortured. As a woman, I lost my dignity.”
To the people who live in the tri-border region where southwest Chad and northwest Central African Republic (CAR) meet Cameroon’s North Region, the area has become a hive of crime known as “the Triangle of Death.”
The combination of porous borders and security forces focused on terrorism in the Lake Chad region to the north makes the area a haven for criminals, where kidnappings have skyrocketed in recent years.
Nestor Déli, 51, a journalist who has written two books and numerous articles about the kidnapping spree over the last two decades, said the Triangle of Death is beyond state control.
“The state seems more concerned about the rebellions in the north and considers this as an epiphenomenon,” he told Agence France-Presse.
Déli’s analysis is reflected in the area’s residents, who feel that they have no choice but to organize themselves into vigilante groups. Amos Mbairo Nangyo, 35, coordinates one of the groups.
“We are like civil intelligence agents,” he told AFP. “We are the eyes and the ears of the governor and security forces, to whom we pass the information.”
Barka Tao, coordinator of a local nongovernmental organization called the Organization for Support of Development Initiatives, said the number of kidnapping victims is difficult to know because so many are not reported to law enforcement authorities.
“Some people refuse to talk out of fear of reprisals, but there could have been nearly 1,500 victims in 20 years,” he told AFP.
Déli said origins of the problem date to slave raids that depopulated the area in pre-colonial times.
“The first recorded case dates back to 2003,” he told French newspaper Le Monde. “From that date onwards, civil wars in the Central African Republic and Sudan encouraged the circulation of arms and fighters in Chad’s border areas.”
The Triangle of Death stretches from Mayo-Kebbi Ouest and Logone Oriental in Chad and Lim-Pendé in the CAR to Cameroon’s North Region. Déli describes the region as isolated, underdeveloped and absent of state authorities — an ideal refuge for drug and arms traffickers and rampaging bandits known since the 1980s by the generic term “zaraguina.”
“Today, kidnappings take place in broad daylight, sometimes even in city centers,” Déli said. “Their perpetrators are less and less hesitant to do away with hostages whose parents are slow to pay.”
Remadji Hoinathy, a Central Africa and Lake Chad Basin researcher who is based in Chad’s capital, N’Djamena, and works for the Institute for Security Studies, agreed with Déli that “the geography and even the demography and anthropology of that zone” helped make it a hub of kidnapping and recruitment for armed groups.
“A lot of people in Chad [have] grown up with rebellions [and learned] that the only life they have is a link with weapons,” he told British newspaper The Guardian. “They are finding ways of living by the gun … either you are a rebel [or] with the army, or you end up as a mercenary, kidnapper, in banditry or Boko Haram.”