Frontiers in North Africa

(b) The Aozou Strip

The southern border arises from a delimitation of zones of influence in Africa between Britain and France in 1899, but was later subject to further negotiation by Italy as the colonial power which culminated in the unratified 1935 treaty - the basis of the current Libyan claim to the Aozou Strip. The Anglo-French declaration of March 21, 1899 provided that the two zones of influence would be delimited by a line running south eastwards from the intersection of the 16th degree of longitude east of Greenwich and the Tropic of Cancer until it intersected the 24th degree of longitude. This arrangement was accepted by Italy in an exchange of notes with France in July 1902, although, until 1934, the southern border of Libya was completed to the east by the intersection of the 22nd parallel with the 1899 line (Brownlie 1979; 123).

Surprisingly, no map was included with the 1899 convention document - although the 1902 exchange of notes suggests there was such a map. If it did exist, it has never been found. This is important because the convention refers to a line running south east, whereas all later practice, treaty or otherwise - the 1919 Anglo-French agreement or the 1924 Sudan-Chad delimitation (Brownlie 1979; 618-639), for instance - make it clear that the tripoint for Sudan, Libya and Chad was to be l9 30'N, 24 E, indicating a line running east-south-east (Lanne 1982; 24-25). The tripoint would otherwise have been due west of Oum Chalouba in Chad. The western section of the border simply consisted of a line joining the terminal point of the Toummo oasis border from Ghat to the intersection of the Tropic of Cancer and the 16 N line of longitude.

The great problem with the Libya-Chad border arises from the interplay of European politics on the colonial African scene. This is the now famous Aozou Strip which Libya occupied unilaterally from1973 (Joffe 1981; 92) until the matter was eventually settled by the International Court of Justice in 1994. Until then, Libya had claimed that it was an integral part of its national territory on the basis of an unratified Franco-Italian treaty dating from 1935. Initially, the problem arose because, at the end of the Italo-Sanusi wars in Libya in 1927, the Fascist authorities in Tripoli began to lay claim to areas far to the south of the 1899 line, on the grounds that these had been controlled by the Ottoman administration of the vilayat of Tripoli and that Italy, as the successor state to the Ottoman administration in Libya, could claim the same territorial extent to its colony as had the Ottomans. The claim was implicitly based on the principle of uti possidetis - the legal principle that successor states are entitled to the international boundaries of their predecessors (Bougaita 1979; 233-274: Brownlie 1979; 11: Murty 1978; 169).

In a note to France on June 29, 1929, Italy laid claim to all Chadian territory north of the 18th parallel and to corresponding territories in Niger north of the same line and to the east of Ghat, along the 10th meridian east of Greenwich. The note was a riposte to a French proposal, made on December 28, 1928, for the cessation of the In Ezzane-Toummo-Djado triangle in Niger - a move clearly made to avert the growing demand in Italy for a major revision of the border situation in Chad (Lanne 1982; 108-121).

Although the Italian demand was rejected, France grew increasingly concerned over Italian behaviour in Europe, where the threat of a new war was closely bound up with the emergence of a commonality of interests between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany as the 1930s wore on. At the same time, Italy had further demands on France over the status of Italian citizens in Tunisia (Lanne 1982; 125) as well as irredentist claims on Nice. In an attempt to counter all these problems and to ensure that Italy did not ally with Germany, the French government - despite considerable domestic opposition - decided to cede a large portion of Chadian territory, consisting of a strip of land parallel to the existing frontier and about 200 km deep to Libya. The proposed cession involved half of the Tibesti massif, the homeland of the Tebu - a tribal group which had close links with the Fezzan (Muller 1982; 170) and which had been closely allied with the Sanusi at the end of the nineteenth century (Morsy 1984; 282).

Ironically, the treaty never came into force - although it was approved by the parliaments in both countries, because the instruments of ratification were never exchanged. The reason was quite simple, shortly after the treaty had been negotiated, Italy joined the Axis and the occupation of Ethiopia became the major concern of Italian policy. In this climate, France and Italy had little to gain from the treaty and the border thus remained unchanged. However, the claim did not lapse and independent Libyan governments have continued to sustain it. Even though the 1955 Franco-Libyan treaty formally implied that Libya had abandoned any claims under the 1935 treaty, the fact is that the claim was sustained,both under the Libyan monarchy and the Qadhafi regime. Indeed, a large part of Libyan policy in Chad was conditioned by this consideration alone and Colonel Qadhafi was quite explicit in 1980 that this was the main aim of Libya's intervention in Chad (Joffe 1981; 94).

In 1987, however, these arcane considerations of colonial and pre-colonial history were overthrown by military action. Libya's presence in the region was ended by the Hissan Habré regime in Chad which, with French and American backing, launched a highly successful offensive against Libyan forces there. Libya was forced to withdraw back to the pre-1935 border-line. Colonel Qadhafi's anger at his reverse was diverted by Moroccan and Algerian intervention and he was persuaded to place the matter before the International Court of Justice. The Court ignored sophisticated Libyan arguments based on colonial and precolonial history, accepting instead Chad's argument that Libya, by accepting a treaty with France and an exchange of letters with Paris over treaty status in 1955 and 1956, had, as an independent state, also accepted the pre-1935 colonial boundaries of Libya and thus had no right to the Aozou Strip. In February 1994, when the Court's judgement was issued, Libya agreed to a border treaty with Chad which recognised the pre-1935 line as its international boundary - it had by then avenged its 1987 defeat by aiding the expulsion of the Habré regime in December 1990!

In any case, the consequent territorial division of the Tebu territory was hardly unique in the annals of North African colonial border delimitations, however, since the same problems had occurred with the delimitation of the original border and no attention whatever had ever been paid to considerations such as pasturing patterns or cultivation locations of the different tribal populations involved. In this respect, the delimitation of the Chad-Libyan border represented the consequence of negotiations between sovereign states, rather than an imposition of European values of sovereign delimitation on local demographic divisions, as had been the case with the Tunisian-Tripolitanian boundary. In the latter case, problems had been caused by associating French concepts of territorial delimitation to indigeneous concepts of tribal autonomy whereby usufruct of the territory concerned was distributed between different groups, although political control was exercised de facto by the most powerful. The creation of an European-style impenetrable boundary had, in consequence, caused considerable hardship and stored up tensions and problems for independence. Although the frontier has now been accepted by both Libya and Tunisia, there are still periodic rumblings from Tripoli over the situation. The same conflict between demography and territorial delimitation obtained in the Ghat region, although there the issue of treaty interpretation is the primary concern today.