With bows, slingshots and spears in hand, the young villagers advanced in a line through a forest in the town of Pala in southwest Chad. As the early morning light sifted through the trees, some crawled through the undergrowth while others crouched behind eucalyptus trees.
Their leader gave a signal, and they split into small groups. Another signal stopped the men in their tracks, and they trained their weapons on an imaginary target.
“Release the hostages and put your weapons down,” they shouted, according to Agence France-Presse. The training exercise was designed to prepare for the likelihood of confronting kidnappers in the area.
The Pala-Coton Tchad watchdog committee is one of several vigilante groups that formed to combat the scourge of kidnappings that have plagued the Mayo-Kebbi Ouest region for more than 20 years.
In that time, there have been more than 1,500 victims, according to estimates from a Chadian nongovernmental organization called the Organization for Support of Development Initiatives, which has monitored the problem since the early 2000s.
It says the Mayo-Kebbi Ouest, one of the country’s most populous regions, is the epicenter of a kidnapping epidemic that has spread across the tri-border region where Chad, the Central African Republic (CAR) and Cameroon meet. Locals call it the “Triangle of Death.”
In the absence of adequate support from local authorities in Chad, residents have taken it upon themselves to organize vigilante groups.
Amos Mbairo Nangyo, the 35-year-old director of a security company in Pala and coordinator of the vigilance and surveillance committees in Mayo-Kebbi Ouest, said the groups operate like intelligence units passing information to security forces.
“We guide the gendarmes in the bush, but we are also the first to go after the criminals following a kidnapping,” he told AFP. “We chase them, armed with our bows and our spears.”
Ulf Laessing, director of the Sahel program at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, a German think tank, said the war in Sudan has shifted Chad’s security concerns to its eastern border.
“They’ve moved their capacity to better monitor that border,” he told British newspaper The Guardian in July. “That might be a reason that they are not able to effectively guard the border with Cameroon as before.”
Chadian authorities said ransoms paid in the Mayo-Kebbi Ouest region in 2022 were about 43 million Central African CFA francs (about $71,000 U.S. dollars), a figure that increased to 52.4 million CFA francs in 2023.
About 86 million CFA francs were paid in ransom in six incidents between February and May 2023 in Cameroon’s Nord region, according to a January 2024 report by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC).
“Despite military operations against the zaraguinas (the generic term for bandits) having delivered moderate gains in the Nord region in 2022, the history of criminality in northern Cameroon suggests that military pressure is likely to merely geographically displace the violence or catalyze a transformation in the criminal dynamics of the region,” the report stated.
GI-TOC warned that the growing rash of kidnappings could “cause damaging economic ripples across the region … as Cameroon has become the main trade artery for Chad and the CAR. The majority of imports and exports into these countries now pass through the tri-border region.”
Cameroonian and Chadian service chiefs met in Yaoundé, Cameroon, in October 2023 to discuss collaboration to address cross-border crime. But experts believe a broader regional effort is needed to dismantle criminal networks that operate throughout the area’s remote forests.
Nangyo said more than 4,000 young people in the Mayo-Kebbi Ouest region have joined vigilante groups, although he admits their bows and slingshots are no match for heavily armed kidnappers.
“It’s dangerous volunteer work, and we ask the state for resources so we can move about — motorbikes and horses or even just boots,” he said.
It’s a complex problem that demands more attention, said Timothée Fenessoubo, a lawyer from Pala and a member of a regional legal collective formed in February 2023 to assist kidnapping victims.
“Residents are abandoning their lands to seek refuge in towns and villages,” he told French newspaper La Croix in July. “Agriculture and livestock farming allow families to pay for their children’s education. If the government doesn’t address this problem and help the victims, the region could ignite.”
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