Chad vs Romania

In 1959, as Chad prepared for full independence from France, lawmakers designed a national flag by merging the French tricolor with the Pan-African green, yellow, and red. Because neighboring Mali was already using green, yellow, and red, Chad substituted blue for green, creating the blue-yellow-red vertical tricolor. At that time, Romania was a communist state whose flag featured an ornate socialist coat of arms right in the center, making the two designs easy to tell apart.

That visual separation vanished in December 1989. During the Romanian Revolution against Nicolae Ceaușescu, protesters cut the communist seal out of their flags, waving banners with holes in the middle. When the post-communist government codified the new national flag, they simply made the plain tricolor official, unaware or indifferent to the fact that Chad had been flying that exact layout for thirty years.

In 2004, the dispute reached diplomatic channels. Chad asked the United Nations to examine the issue. Romanian President Ion Iliescu publicly refused to alter Romania's banner, stating that the tricolor had belonged to Romanians since the mid-19th century. Because neither country has changed its law, the two nations fly identical layouts separated only by ink formulations.