The former U.S.-backed dictator of Chad, Hissène Habré, has been convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison. Habré is accused of killing as many as 40,000 people during his eight years in power in the 1980s. At the landmark trial in Senegal, Habré was convicted of rape, sexual slavery and ordering killings during his reign of terror. Habré was tried in a special African Union-backed court established after a two-decade-long campaign led by his victims. This is the first time the leader of one African country has been prosecuted in another African country’s domestic court system for human rights abuses.
Habré was tried in a special African Union-backed court established after a two-decade-long campaign led by his victims. This is the first time the leader of one African country has been prosecuted in another African country’s domestic court system for human rights abuses. After the verdict was read, survivors of Habré’s regime embraced each other in the courtroom.
Hissène Habré is a former U.S. ally who’s been described as “Africa’s Pinochet.” He came to power with the help of the Reagan administration in 1982. The U.S. provided Habré with millions of dollars in annual military aid and trained his secret police, known as the DDS. After Habré’s sentencing, Human Rights Watch’s attorney Reed Brody tweeted, “Habré’s conviction for these horrific crimes after 25 years is a huge victory for his Chadian victims, without whose tenacity this trial never would have happened. This verdict sends a powerful message that the days when tyrants could brutalize their people, pillage their treasury and escape abroad to a life of luxury are coming to an end. Today will be carved into history as the day that a band of unrelenting survivors brought their dictator to justice”.
Reed Brody talking:
it’s just an immense satisfaction. I mean, as the judge was reading the verdict and as we heard his—you know, the narrative that the victims have been weaving for 25 years, basically detailed by the judge, who found the allegations credible, and we could see—we could see the way the judge was heading. It was just this immense moment of satisfaction. And right after the verdict, you know, we were embracing, and there were a number of widows who had come from Chad specially for the occasion, who started ululating. And, you know, I have—you know, very few people thought that this day would ever come. One of them was Souleymane Guengueng, who you highlighted before. And just, I mean, last night with Souleymane until 1:00 in our hotel room, we were rewatching a TV reading of the verdict, and just hard to believe that, you know, this day has come, that these victims have finally achieved justice.
Souleymane was a deeply religious civil servant. You know, he was thrown in jail on false charges. As people were dying around him in his prison cell, you know, he took an oath before God that if he ever got out, he would fight for justice. And when the prison—when Idriss Déby overthrew Hissène Habré and the prison doors swung open, Souleymane got together others and founded the first victims’ association, and has been fighting since then. Many of Habré’s accomplices were still and are still in Chad—mayors, police chiefs, governors. And they started making death threats against Souleymane and forced him to go into exile in the United States. And Souleyman’s been fighting for the last 10 years.
Habré was arrested for the first time 16 years ago here in Senegal. And the previous government of Senegal just for 12 years gave us the runaround. I mean, Habré left—before Habré left Chad, he emptied out his country’s treasury, and he brought all that money here to Senegal and created a web of political influence and support. He also, I think, silently had the support of a lot of other African heads of state, who made it clear they didn’t want to see this precedent created. And so, the victims fought in Senegal. When the case was thrown out in Senegal, they went to Belgium. Belgium investigated the case for four years, requested Habré’s extradition. Senegal said no. We actually made an ally of the African Union, which said to Senegal, “Well, if you don’t want to extradite him to Belgium, you should prosecute him in Senegal.” President Wade, then, of Senegal agreed, but he didn’t do it.
And actually, Belgium took this case to the International Court of Justice, the World Court in The Hague. And in 2012, the World Court ruled by a unanimous decision that Senegal had a legal obligation to prosecute or to extradite Hissène Habré. And that same—in those same months, Macky Sall became the president of Senegal, and Macky Sall was one of the many leaders of Senegal who the victims had been visiting over the years, creating the political support here in Senegal, creating the political conditions. And since 2012, the government of Senegal has been behind this court, and as you said, it was a court established by Senegal and the African Union. The trial started last year, and yesterday we got the verdict.
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In 1982, when Ronald Reagan came into power earlier, you know, Hissène Habré was seen as a bulwark against Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, who had expansionist designs on Chad and was seen by President Reagan as the mad dog, the enemy. And as a way of—in the words of secretary of state at the time Alexander Haig, they supported Habré in order to bloody Gaddafi’s nose. And the U.S.—the first covert operation of the Reagan administration, before Jonas Savimbi in Angola, before the Contras in Nicaragua, was an effort to bring this warlord, Hissène Habré, to power, even though at the time he already had a record of brutality in Chad’s civil war, a mass grave discovered behind his residence. He had kidnapped a French anthropologist, and his forces executed the negotiator who had come to seek her rescue. The United States supported Hissène Habré. And then, once he was in power in 1982, France and the United States gave huge military, political support to the Habré government.
You know, we don’t have—there’s no—we have no knowledge of a direct implication in particular crimes by the United States, but from the DDS, from the documents of Habré’s political police that we uncovered 15 years ago, we see a man who was considered by the political police to be the U.S. Embassy’s liaison to that political police, the former head of the political police. And once again, the political police was the main instrument of repression under the Habré administration. It had an archipelago of secret prisons in Chad. The documents of these political police, which I—which I happened to stumble on 15 years ago in Chad, provide the names of 1,208 people who died in detention, of almost 12,000 prisoners of the DDS. The U.S., we know, trained some of those DDS officials—not in torture, as far as we know, but many of them came to the United States for counterinsurgency, for—in particular, for bomb diffusion and for antiterrorism. We know that the head of the DDS, at his own trial in N’Djamena last year, testified that the United States—that he was constantly accompanied by a CIA agent who was advising him. Names of the U.S. agents who are mentioned by the Chadians—in fact, they don’t have—they talk about Maurice and John and Swiker [phon.], and those are names of people who are listed in the State Department registry as people who worked at the U.S. Embassy. So there was a connection between the United States and Hissène Habré’s political police.
We also know that Chad fought a war, and Chad—with French and American assistance, Chad turned back the Libyan forces. It captured over a thousand Libyan POWs. Many of—the United States established a secret training camp in Chad to turn the Libyans, to create a contra force against Muammar Gaddafi. And this secret base, which even the French did not know about at the time, was led by a man named Khalifa Haftar, who later emigrated or was brought by the U.S. to Virginia and is now the strong man in Benghazi, who’s leading one of the factions in Libya. And so, the United States used Hissène Habré as an ally in its—in what was then the war on Gaddafi’s terror in the 1980s.
And all this time, of course, you know, although many of Habré’s crimes were not really revealed until after the prison—after he fell and the prison doors swung open, Amnesty International, as their representative testified at the trial, wrote 25 mini reports about crimes under Hissène Habré. Habré was aware, of course, of these crimes, but the world was aware that these crimes were going on. The United States, even as it supported Hissène Habré at the time, was aware that these crimes were taking place.
Habré was overthrown in December 1990, so it was still under the Republican administrations. Hissène Habré was fêted in 1987 at the White House. He got a state visit, or he got a visit to the White House with President Reagan. Our Freedom of Information Act requests show that even as Habré was falling, the U.S. Embassy was cabling back home that it was not too late, that Hissène Habré could be saved. Ultimately, the U.S. helped Hissène Habré reinstall himself in Senegal. That was in 1990. And he basically, from 1990, lived a life of luxury in Senegal.
And it was really when the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was arrested in London on a warrant from a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, who was here in court yesterday, for crimes committed in Chile, and the House of Lords said that Pinochet could be arrested anywhere in the world, despite his status as a former head of state, that we realized that we had in international justice a tool to bring to book tyrants and torturers who seemed out of the reach of justice. And that’s when we were contacted by the Chadian Association for Human Rights, who said, “What those people are doing, what the Chileans are doing, we want to do that with Hissène Habré.” And that’s why Habré got the moniker—actually, we gave him the name at the time, “the African Pinochet.”
one takeaway from all of this, it’s the hope that other people around the world, other victims, other survivors, other activists, will look at what the Chadians have done, fighting for 25 years and achieving justice, and say, “We want to do what Hissène Habré’s victims have done.”
Rose Lokissim was thrown in jail, and actually Rose would take notes when people would die or be tortured in prison. Rose would take notes and try to smuggle them out so that the outside world knew what was going on. And she was denounced, and she was taken out of her cell, and she was interrogated. And 20—15 years later, we found—in the files of the political police that I talked about before, we found her last interrogation report. And as she was, you know, being interrogated, as she was on her—you know, clearly going to be executed, she told her torturers, who wrote it down, she said, “I don’t care what happens to me. I’m doing this for my country. My cause is right. Chad will remember me, and history will talk about me.” And the only record we have of this is what her torturers wrote on a piece of paper that we found in the files of the political police 15 years ago. And today, history is talking about Rose, and people are talking about what happened in the Chadian prisons under Hissène Habré.
And, you know, one last thing: Habré was convicted for sexual crimes. He was actually convicted for personally having raped Khadija Hassan Zidane, a woman who I’ve known for 17 years. And so Habré is a convicted rapist today. And this is a message, you know, that even rape—I mean, Habré—that Habré is not above the law, and that Khadija Hassan and none of these women, including two of the ones who you saw on camera there who were raped, are below the law.
Habré has been in jail for the last three years, from the time his—he was indicted. And so he’s going to go back—he’s back in the jail that he’s been in, which is probably the jail that he’s going to be spending his sentence in. It’s apparently a very comfortable—you know, comfortable and proper and modern jail.
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Reed Brody
counsel and spokesperson for Human Rights Watch. He has worked with victims of Hissène Habré’s regime since 1999 and played a critical role in bringing Habré to trial.
— source democracynow.org
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