40 Middle East & Africa The EconomistJuly 20th 2019
1Y
usuf nuhan, a 65-year-old Chadian
villager, remembers when he could sail
across Lake Chad to visit markets and rela-
tives. His village used to be rich with thou-
sands of cattle, he says. But three years ago,
jihadists from Boko Haram attacked and
took everything. “They just killed people.
We don’t know why,” he says, fiddling with
his prayer beads. “The government has
done nothing to help us.”
He and his family fled to Baga Sola, a
small, dry market town a few kilometres
away. They set up camp outside the walls of
a United Nations base and prayed that one
day they could return to their land. But over
the past few months, there has been a re-
surgence of Boko Haram attacks, killing
dozens of soldiers. In theory Mr Nuhan
could walk to his childhood home in two
hours, but he has given up hope of ever see-
ing his land again.
Chad is at the heart of Africa’s most un-
governable region. Landlocked, it shares
borders with conflict-ridden Libya, Sudan,
the Central African Republic and Boko Ha-
ram’s strongholds in Nigeria, Niger and
Cameroon. Many Western military offi-
cials see the president, Idriss Déby, as a bul-
wark against that insecurity. Through bru-
tality and military cunning he has
managed to hold on to power for almost
three decades. But the state he leads is rot-
ten and his rule precarious.
In February three columns of Toyota
pickup trucks packed with Chadian rebels
sped out of the desert from Libya towards
N’Djamena, Chad’s capital. The rebels were
led by Mr Déby’s cousin and were largely
disgruntled members of the president’s
ethnic group, the Zaghawa. At Chad’s re-quest, French warplanes from Barkhane,
France’s anti-jihadist force in the Sahel,
strafed the rebels for three days. France, the
former colonial power, had intervened to
help out Mr Déby before, but never with
such a show of force.
Since the 1960s Lake Chad, on which
farmers and fisherfolk depend, has shrunk
by half. Almost all of the country’s 16m peo-
ple are poor. Chadians joke: “We are all go-ing to heaven as we’ve already experienced
hell on earth.” The president regularly im-
prisons opponents. But his real source of
power is the ability to distribute patronage
paid for by Chad’s main export, oil.
There has been less of that available
since the sharp decline in oil prices in 2014.
Big international debts give the govern-
ment little room for manoeuvre. Civil-ser-
vant and army salaries have been cut. In-N’DJAMENA
Idriss Déby, president for almost thirty
years, is running out of patronageChadHanging Chad
A
country thatdraws39mforeign
tourists each year is on the brink of
anarchy, if you believe the Saudi media.
“Turkey is not safe for travel,” blared a
recent headline in a Saudi newspaper.
The kingdom’s embassy in Ankara has
warned of rising petty crime aimed at
Saudi citizens. Another story claimed
that 2,187 people were killed in gun vio-
lence in Turkey in 2017. (There are no
such warnings about America, where
gun deaths are far more common.)
It is true that one Saudi visitor in
Turkey last year was murdered and dis-
membered. However, his killers were not
locals but a 15-member Saudi hit squad
and the murder took place inside a Saudi
consulate. The victim was a journalist,
Jamal Khashoggi, who had upset the
Saudi regime. His death made tense
relations between the two countries
much worse. Hence the campaign by
Saudi officials to discourage their citi-
zens from travelling to Turkey. It seems
to be working: Saudi tourist arrivals were
down by 31% in the first five months of
this year compared with last.
Many Arab regimes restrict where
their citizens may travel. In 1989 a Thai
labourer stole jewellery from the palace
of a Saudi prince, a caper known as the“bluediamondaffair”.Three Saudi dip-
lomats were then murdered in Bangkok
in murky incidents that may or may not
have been connected with the theft. The
kingdom promptly banned its nationals
from visiting Thailand. Most of the jew-
els were returned. But the prohibition
remains in force. Last year Thailand saw
just 28,000 Saudi visitors, compared
with 75,000 from much smaller Kuwait.
Cheap, Arabic-speaking and compara-
tively clement, Egypt has always been a
popular destination for Gulf tourists. But
Qataris now avoid it because of politics:
Egypt was one of four countries to im-
pose an embargo on the emirate in 2017.
The embargo has even turned the hajj,
the pilgrimage to Mecca, into a political
spat: Saudi Arabia and Qatar accuse each
other of obstructing travel for Qatari
pilgrims. The United Arab Emirates has
forbidden travel to Lebanon since 2012,
supposedly because of kidnapping risks.
In 2011 some 32,000 Emiratis flew to
Beirut. Last year fewer than 1,800 did.
In Egypt, citizens aged under 40 need
state-security approval before flying to
Turkey. The ban was imposed in 2014 to
stop Egyptians from crossing into Syria
to join Islamic State. That is no longer a
worry. Yet the rule remains in place, as
one woman recently discovered while
trying to spend a long weekend in Istan-
bul with her foreign partner. (Airport
police helpfully encouraged him to take
the holiday solo.) Permits are also some-
times required for notorious hotbeds of
Islamism like Georgia and South Korea.
By discouraging travel to Turkey, the
Saudi government may hope to keep
tourist rials at home. King Salman has set
an example the past two summers. In-
stead of his usual visit to a palace in
Morocco, he has taken staycations at
Neom, a planned $500bn city on the
kingdom’s north-western coast. The
summer heat is no doubt unbearable, but
on the bright side, there are no crowds at
the beach: the city has no residents yet.Boycottsofsummer
Travel bansCAIRO
In the Middle East, even your holidays are political