More than 10,000 people are homeless after government authorities ordered scores of homes destroyed following a failed coup attempt, an international human rights group said Thursday.
Human Rights Watch said many of those evicted from their homes in the capital received no notice about the demolitions and have been left destitute.
Some had fled during the recent fighting and a state of emergency that following, returning to find their homes destroyed. Others had legal deeds proving they had bought the property as recently as last year.
"I came across a group of men _ heads of households _ standing outside the rubble of their houses with their title deeds in their hands," said a researcher for the rights group, David Buchbinder.
The government said the residents had occupied the land illegally. The mayor said the decision came during a state of emergency.
"We are in an exceptional time. The head of state's decree came at that time," Mayor Mahamat Zene Bada said. "When one says we are living in an exceptional time, there is no discussion. There is nothing else to say."
He declined to comment on allegations that a racetrack would be built in one of the destroyed neighborhoods.
Buchbinder described one man who was pulling the splinters of wood that remained from his furniture from the ruins of his home as others debated what to do with their deeds.
"It was such a hopeless moment," he said. Some have returned to refugee camps in neighboring Cameroon, Buchbinder said.
Resident Abdoulaye Ahmat said his family's home _ and history _ were destroyed.
"It is difficult to leave a place where one has lived all their life and go live elsewhere. I was born in this neighborhood, I grew up here and I was married here," he said. "My children grew up here as well. My second daughter just got married here to a young man of the neighborhood."
The government has promised to compensate those who lost property. But Berlin-based watchdog Transparency International rates Chad as one of the most corrupt countries in the world.
Impoverished Chad has been riven by decades of war with sporadic periods of uneasy peace since its independence from France in 1960.
The current conflict, partly a spillover from Sudan's Darfur region, began in 2005.
Chad and Sudan frequently accuse each other of supporting rebel groups across their common border, and the Chadian rebels have been strengthened by several defections from the president's inner circle, who say they are fed up with him squandering the country's oil wealth and angered that he changed the constitution to extend his time in office.
