| abstract
| - The organization was born as the result of a political union between the leftist Chadian National Union (UNT), led by Ibrahim Abatcha, and the General Union of the Children of Chad (Union Générale des Fils du Tchad or UGFT) which was led by Ahmed Hassan Musa. Musa was close to the Muslim Brotherhood and was an Islamist. The UGFT remained autonomous within the new group under the banner of the Liberation Front of Chad (FLT). The union was agreed at the Nyala Congress, in Sudan, between June 19 and June 22 of 1966. The group's flag was approved at the same congress. Secretary-general was proclaimed Abatcha, while another cadre of the UNT, Abou Bakar Djalabou, was designed to lead the delegation that was to represent the movement abroad. A committee was also selected at the congress, composed of thirty members taken equally from the UNT and the FLT. The front was composed exclusively by Muslim northerners, and there was to be no attempt to create a link with the Southern expatriates in the Central African Republic. The movement's official program, also approved at the Nyala congress, proclaimed the rejection of secession, confessional politics and ethnic discrimination, and that neocolonialism should be fought in order to "regain the total national independence of our fatherland". A coalition government, national and democratic, was to be formed, and all political prisoners freed. All foreign troops were to leave, and support was to be given to national liberation movements, and a foreign policy of positive neutrality searched. Quite vague were the economic objectives: wages would be raised, arbitrary taxes abolished and the land given to the tillers. In conclusion, "the document was so vague and so general it could have been written for any country under the sun." While the FROLINAT was originally composed of few members, it could count on the fact that the Chadian state was already in disarray; the southern-dominated government despised and bypassed the Muslim traditional leaders, and already in 1963 the most important Northern politicians had been arrested, and all important positions in the Chadian Armed Forces and in the local administration was kept by non-Muslim Southerners. To cite Sam Nolutschungu, "everyone knew that the regime was corrupt, cruel, arbitrary, and absurd." This miscontent generated already in November 1965 the bloody Mangalmé riots, that gave way to a number of loosely knitted peasant revolts in central and eastern Chad, that from Mangalmé and nearby Batha Prefecture, rapidly spread to Ouaddaï and Salamat prefectures, where in February 1967 the prefect and his deputy were killed. In northern Chad, in the BET Prefecture, also in 1965 unrest had started expanding. So Abatcha, when with seven North Korean trained companions, penetrated in Eastern Chad in November 1966, could count on a territory that was already in full revolt. Musa and the most conservative elements of the FLT pulled out of the FROLINAT already at the end on 1966, but a dualism was always to remain between the socialist, anti-imperialist, even Pan-African UNT element and more the conservative and regionalist UGFT tradition. Another element of division consisted in the dualism between the two originary areas of the rebellion, that is Kanem and the East: the first region mainly attracting support from Chadians living in Egypt and the Central African Republic, the second mainly from Sudan. With the forces of both groups combined began in the same year to operate in the mid-east of the country, under the direct command of Abatcha. Shortly after, in March 1968, a lieutenant of Abatcha, Mohammed Taher, instigated a mutiny by the Daza Toubou of the Nomad and National Guard (GNN) of Aozou, that was evacuated by the national army in September. Taher had already recruited militants among the Teda Toubou in the Borkou, and shortly after the Aozou mutiny obtained the support of Goukouni Oueddei, an influential figure among the Teda of the Tibesti and son of the derde of the Toubou, Oueddei Kichidemi. This extended the insurgency to the north and Toubou nomads, adding a new element of complexity to the rebellion and bringing in the support to the movement of the Chadians living in Libya, and especially the students of the Islamic University of Bayda.
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