By Pascal Fletcher
ACCRA, July 3 (Reuters) - Chad's foreign minister on Tuesday urged rebels fighting President Idriss Deby to lay down their arms and join peaceful party politics, and said negotiations with them would continue.
Ahmat Allam-mi told Reuters that peace talks in Tripoli between government negotiators and a coalition of anti-Deby rebel groups would go on after a brief suspension this week called during an African Union summit being held in Ghana.
"The negotiations are to continue and we hope they'll finish with a reasonable agreement," he said on the sidelines of the AU summit in Accra.
The rebels, a fractious alliance of insurgents and army deserters, have been waging a hit-and-run guerrilla war in east Chad, where armed raiders and refugees have also spilled over the border from the even longer-running conflict in Sudan's Darfur region.
Deby's armed opponents, who want a national political dialogue leading to early free elections in the landlocked former French colony, said on Monday that they could return to all-out hostilities if the Tripoli talks failed.
Allam-mi said the Libyan-brokered peace talks had not ended and he urged the rebels to turn themselves into non-violent political parties.
"I think the military political actors should insert themselves into the peaceful process underway in Chad and participate in its political life," he said.
REBEL DEMANDS
But the minister added Chad's government did not consider the rebels and legal opposition parties on the same footing. Some rebel leaders have been demanding that the Chadian opposition parties be allowed to participate in the Tripoli talks but the government has opposed this.
"We're against mixing together those who turn to violence to solve political problems with those who use legal and peaceful means," he said.
Allam-mi said the rebels should respect Chad's political institutions as they existed. He noted that the rebels' demands had included a change of president.
"Let's be reasonable," he said.
Deby, a former French-trained helicopter pilot, himself seized power in 1990 in a revolt from the east.
He amended the constitution in 2005, removing a two-term limit for heads of state and an age limit of 70 for presidential candidates. This cleared the way for his re-election last year in polls boycotted as unfair by opponents.
The Chadian minister said it was not yet clear if there was any political motive behind the killing of Deby's son in Paris in the last few days.
Brahim Deby, widely seen as his father's choice to succeed him as president, was discovered dead in his car early on Monday near his home in the French capital.
A post-mortem showed he was asphyxiated, probably by powder from a fire extinguisher. "You can't rule out any hypothesis but we don't have any to offer at the moment," Allam-mi said, adding that a French police inquiry was underway.
