Ngarlejy Yorongar

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Ngarlejy Yorongar is a Chadian politician, leader of the opposition party Front of Action Forces for the Republic (in French Front des Forces d'Action pour la République or FAR).

Before entering in politics Yorongar had been in the civil service of his country. His first employment was in N'Djamena at the Ministry of Finance; thence he became in succession adjutant to the sub-prefect of Moundou, sub-prefect of Mbaïnarmar, first adjutant to the prefect and then prefect of Guéra. At this point Yorongar passed to working out of Chad, first as consultant in Paris to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OCDE), then as director of the African Bureau of Educational Sciences (BASE) at Kisangani (Zaire), lastly as director of the Institut International des Assurances (IIA) at Yaoundé (Cameroon).[1]

The first of his many politically motivated arrests was in March 1994, when he was detained for five days, and in July 1996 for 13 days.^[1]

His political beginnings were not brilliant: in the presidential election of 1996 as a presidential candidate he only collected 2.08% of the popular vote,^[2] and in the following parliamentary election of 1997 Yorongar was the only FAR candidate to obtain a seat in the National Assembly.

In an interview in June 1997, he accused the National Assembly's President, Wadal Abdelkader Kamougue, of taking a bribe of 15 million French francs from Elf, a partner in the Chad-Cameroon Petroleum Development and Pipeline Project; in the same interview, he also attacked President Idriss Déby. For this Yorongar was stripped of his parliamentary immunity on May 26, 1998 and arrested on June 3. On July 20, after a trial judged unfair by Amnesty International, he was found guilty of defamation and sentenced to three years imprisonment and a fine of 500,000 CFA francs. He was released after eight months of detention on February 5, 1999.[2]

In March 22, 2001 Yorongar, on behalf of 120 Chadians, submitted to the World Bank Inspection Panel a request for inspection of the pipeline project, claiming that people living in the Project area and their environment had or were likely to suffer harm as a result of failures and omissions in the design, appraisal, and supervision by the International Development Association of the Project. Also, the request claimed that proper consultation with and disclosure of information to the local communities was not taking place.

In the presidential election of 2001, in which incumbent Idriss Déby obtained a second mandate, Yorongar came second with 396,864 votes (16.35%).^[2] Yorongar and the other opposition candidates hotly contested the fairness of the election; the answer of the government was to arrest them twice, first briefly on May 28 and then on May 30, when they were freed after the intervention of the World Bank's President James Wolfensohn. Yorongar appears to have been tortured while in detention, enduring beatings with iron bars on his back. This was confirmed by the Chadian physicians who first treated him after his release.

The following year Yorongar's party participated in the parliamentary election. The FAR obtained 10 seats, and Yorongar was reelected to parliament.

Two years later, in 2004, the Chadian state was shaken by a serious crisis caused by the determination of the President to obtain a third mandate through a reform of the Constitution. When the following year a constitutional referendum to sanction the National Assembly's vote was looming, Yorongar first attempted to have proclaimed unconstitutional the amendments by the Supreme Court; failed this, he refused to boycott the referendum as all the other main opposition parties had done; instead he campaigned for a "no" vote, but failed, as the referendum passed without problems. Yorongar boycotted the 2006 presidential election, along with most of the opposition, considering it a masquerade planned to legitimize Dèby's reelection.