Chad Flag

The national flag of the Republic of Chad (French: Drapeau du Tchad, Arabic: علم تشاد‎) is a vertical tricolor consisting (left to right) of a blue, a yellow and a red field. Blue was substituted for green to avoid confusion with Mali. The basic design is the same as that of the flag of Romania, and the flag of Andorra. The only divergence from the flag of Romania is different variations of blue on the left strip.

Blue symbolizes, officially, the sky, hope, and water; yellow the sun and the desert to the north of the country; red progress, unity, and sacrifice. Red also recalls the blood shed for independence. RGB colours values are, respectively, 12-28-140, 252-209-22 and 206-17-38.

The flag was adopted by law #59/13 for the autonomous republic and retained on independence in 1960, and in the constitution of 1962. Despite many political upheavals within Chad since independence, the flag has not been changed. This may be because the flag is not associated with any of the main power rivals within Chad, which had no sense of national identity before independence, and little after independence.

For more than 2000 years, the Chadian Basin has been inhabited by agricultural and sedentary peoples. The region became a crossroads of civilizations. The earliest of these were the legendary Sao, known from artifacts and oral histories. The Sao fell to the Kanem Empire, the first and longest-lasting of the empires that developed in Chad's Sahelian strip by the end of the 1st millennium AD. The power of Kanem and its successors was based on control of the trans-Saharan trade routes that passed through the region.

French colonial expansion led to the creation of the Territoire Militaire des Pays et Protectorats du Tchad in 1900. By 1920, France had secured full control of the colony and incorporated it as part of French Equatorial Africa. The French primarily viewed the colony as an unimportant source of untrained labour and raw cotton. The colonial administration in Chad was critically understaffed and had to rely on the dregs of the French civil service.

Fifteen thousand Chadian soldiers fought for Free France during WWII and after the war ended, France granted Chad the status of overseas territory and its inhabitants the right to elect representatives to both the French National Assembly, and to a Chadian assembly. Chad was granted independence on August 11, 1960 with the PPT's leader, François Tombalbaye, as its first president. Two years later, Tombalbaye banned opposition parties and established a one-party system. In 1965 Muslims began a civil war. Tombalbaye was overthrown and killed in 1975, but the insurgency continued. In 1979 the rebel factions conquered the capital, and all central authority in the country collapsed. The disintegration of Chad caused the collapse of France's position in the country, and a civil war in which the Libyans (unsuccessfully) became involved.

A semblance of peace was finally restored in 1990. The government eventually drafted a democratic constitution, and held flawed presidential elections in 1996 and 2001. In 1998, a rebellion broke out in northern Chad, which sporadically flares up despite several peace agreements between the government and the rebels. In 2005 new rebel groups emerged in western Sudan and have made probing attacks into eastern Chad. Power remains in the hands of an ethnic minority. In June 2005, President Idriss Deby held a referendum successfully removing constitutional term limits. In February 2008, an attempted coup rocked the capital.