Hissène Habré, former leader of Chad convicted of crimes against humanity, dies at 79

By Emily Langer,

Joel Robine AFP/Getty Images

Hissène Habré, the former dictator of Chad whose reign of torture and political killings in the 1980s led to his conviction in 2016 on crimes against humanity, a landmark in international criminal justice, died Aug. 24 at a hospital in Dakar, Senegal, where he was serving a life sentence. He was 79.

Jean Bertrand Bocande, director of penitentiary administration, confirmed the death to the Associated Press. Local news outlets reported that Mr. Habré had recently contracted covid-19.

Chad is a landlocked, Central African nation of approximately 17 million, where a dearth of natural resources, long-standing ethnic and religious tensions, and decades of repressive government have consigned its citizens to poverty, political instability and violence.

Known as “Africa’s Pinochet” — a reference to Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the brutal Chilean ruler of the 1970s and 1980s — Mr. Habré came to power in a 1982 coup and ruled for eight years. He was deposed in 1990 by Idriss Déby, who then ruled the country for three decades before his death in April from battlefield wounds sustained amid a conflict with rebels.

[Idriss Déby, repressive president who ruled Chad for 30 years, dies at 68]

The son of a shepherd, Mr. Habré was educated in Paris in the years following Chad’s independence from France in 1960. He rose to power as a leader in the National Liberation Front of Chad, which formed in the 1970s to oust a series of post-colonial governments. Mr. Habré long enjoyed the support of the United States, which regarded Chad as a counterweight to its neighbor to the north, Libya, then under the rule of Col. Moammar Gaddafi.

[Moammar Gaddafi killed in rebel custody as last loyalist holdout in Libya falls]

Mr. Habré maintained his hold on power with the aid of a secret police service, the Documentation and Security Directorate, which reported directly to him. In 1992, a truth commission in Chad determined that his regime operated a network of prisons where 200,000 people were incarcerated and often tortured and where 40,000 died. Mr. Habré was accused of forcing women into sexual slavery for his troops and, in one instance, raping a single woman four times.

Seyllou

AFP/Getty Images

Mr. Habré leaves a courthouse in Dakar, Senegal, in 2015.

Mr. Habré, who after losing power allegedly left Chad with more than $11 million, took exile in Senegal and lived in what were described as opulent conditions. Human rights workers and victims of his regime undertook a complex and circuitous campaign to bring him to trial.

They relied on the notion of “universal jurisdiction,” also applied in the case of Pinochet. According to that legal principle, some offenses, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity, are so severe that the alleged perpetrator may be prosecuted in the court of any nation, regardless of where the crimes took place or where the perpetrator or victims reside.

Indicted in Senegal in 2000, Mr. Habré was convicted 16 years later by the Extraordinary African Chambers on charges including crimes against humanity and torture. He was sentenced to life in prison. The proceedings were notable, The Washington Post reported at the time, because they represented “first trial of a former African ruler in another African country, under the auspices of the African Union, and could be seen as a new model for justice on the continent.”

The trial included the testimony of 90 witnesses, who described the fear induced by Mr. Habré’s secret police and prison apparatus. Inmates endured starvation and rampant illnesses including dengue fever. Guards subjected torture victims to electric shocks, doused them with poison gas and burned them. Some were forced to place their mouths over the exhaust pipes of running vehicles.

One technique, called “the baguettes,” called for two wooden sticks to be tightened over the victim’s temples like a vice. The bodies of inmates who died were often left to decompose for days.

“What I saw in prison is beyond human belief,” one victim, Samuel Togoto, told The Post in 2000, recalling that his limbs were tied behind his back for so long that he was left paralyzed.

For victims and their advocates, Mr. Habré’s conviction carried a moral significance far beyond the legal precedent it set.

“They arrest you and tell you not to talk, so it feels good to say it,” said Ginette Ngarbaye, who was tortured at age 19 while pregnant, according to the London Guardian. “It’s healing.”

Mr. Habré was born in 1942 in Faya-Largeau, in the northern, largely Muslim part of Chad. He worked for the French colonial military before studying in Paris and then returned to Chad, where he worked briefly for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs before joining the National Liberation Front.

The truth commission’s report described Mr. Habré as a shape-shifter who exchanged alliances and loyalties to curry and maintain influence and power. He served in various governments in roles including prime minister and defense minster before taking control of the presidency.

Amid an ongoing conflict between Libya and Chad — and the Cold War pitting the United States against the Soviet Union — Gaddafi’s Libya received weaponry and other support from the Soviets, while the United States and France sought to bolster Chad under Mr. Habré.

Mike Sargent

AFP/Getty Images

Mr. Habré meets with President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office in 1987.

“Habré was a remarkably able man with a brilliant sense of how to play the outside world,” an unnamed U.S. official told The Post in 2000, after Mr. Habré’s indictment. “He was also a bloodthirsty tyrant and torturer. It is fair to say we knew who and what he was and chose to turn a blind eye.”

At the end of Mr. Habré’s trial, then-U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry described the former ruler’s conviction as “a landmark in the global fight against impunity for atrocities” — as well as “an opportunity for the United States to reflect on, and learn from, our own connection with past events in Chad.”

According to the Associated Press, Mr. Habré had two wives, one Chadian and one Senegalese, and kept two villas at his home in exile in Dakar, one for each family. A complete list of survivors was not immediately available.

Describing the findings of the truth commission, the AP obituary noted a memorable line from its final report. Despite his education, his power and his wealth, the commission found, Mr. Habré’s “comportment and thinking [were] not much different from those of a camel thief.”

Read more Washington Post obituaries