Out of Country

Soubiane, 49, sits for an interview wearing gray slacks, blue blazer and white shirt. He speaks softly, slowly, his English deeply accented by the Arabic and French that are his more familiar tongues. His bearing is formal, befitting a diplomat, a politician, as he methodically describes his falling out with his old friend.

"We fought together. We came to power together. And we had a commitment to build democracy," Soubiane says.

But in 2003, he believed that Deby was moving away from democracy.

Deby was in his second term, facing the end of his rule, when Soubiane learned that the president was pressing for a constitutional amendment that would scrap presidential term limits.

Soubiane wrote a letter urging the ruling party in Chad and the president himself not to do so. Of all provisions in new democracies, term limits are among the most important, Soubiane says.

"All the countries who respect this point go on to development," he says.

Human rights advocates and the State Department expressed their concern at the constitutional change, which one U.S. official said "opens the door for him [Deby] to stay in power."

Deby's response was to fire Soubiane and order him home.

Soubiane especially regrets no longer being part of the talks on Chad's newfound oil wealth. As ambassador, he had served as a negotiator with the World Bank on the oil pipeline project that has made Chad the newest "petro-state" in Africa. Soubiane expresses pride in the formula his country created with the bank to spend revenue wisely and avoid the waste and corruption that have afflicted Africa's other petro-states.

But Chad this year was ranked one of the world's two most corrupt countries, along with Bangladesh. The country has a frightening record of human rights abuses -- extrajudicial killings and arbitrary detentions -- under Deby's regime. Soubiane knows all this. Indeed, he had been part of the Deby government.

Yet there is a certain naivete about Soubiane as he expresses his surprise at what happened to him in the United States after he defied Deby.

Nothing happened. That was the rub. It seemed to make no difference. He heard nothing, he says, from those people who propose democracy for other countries. He expected, at least, for his asylum application to be decided.