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Habre (Hissene Habre) (b. August 13, 1942, Faya-Largeau, Chad - d. August 24, 2021, Dakar, Senegal). Prime minister of Chad (1977-1982) who became the president of Chad in 1982.
Of Daza speaking Toubou origin, Habre was born in the northern town of Faya-Largeau. After attending local schools, he worked as a civilian employee for the French army, and then as a sub-prefect in Mao and Moussoro. Afterward, he went to France for advanced studies, and received a law degree, returning to Chad in 1971 to work in the ministry of foreign affairs.
Upon his return, he became increasingly active in the Front de liberation national du Tchad (FROLINAT), a largely northern Muslim movement which began as a peasant rebellion against the southern Christian dominated government, in response to the imposition of heavy taxes and a callous administration. Much of FROLINAT’s support originated in the giant province of Borkou-Ennedi-Tibesti (BET), which comprises half of Chad. Although Chad obtained independence in 1960, BET was occupied by the French military until 1965, as the Chadian government could not control it. By 1966, FROLINAT had emerged as a resistance movement. Within a few years, Habre had become FROLINAT’s military leader.
The political leadership of FROLINAT was based in Tripoli. Tension between Habre and the party’s secretary general, Abba Sikkick, ultimately resulted in Habre breaking off a splinter group, whose followers were mainly of the Garone tribe from northern Chad. Ultimately, Habre assumed control of FROLINAT.
In 1974, Habre’s forces kidnapped some French and German citizens in Bardai, an administrative town in BET. The West German government paid a steep ransom for repatriation of its citizen. France at first refused to pay the $2.4 million demanded by Habre for the release of archeologist Francoise Claustre, but later gave in. However, Claustre and her husband (who was taken prisoner when he came to Chad to try to win Francoise’s release) were held captive until 1977.
In 1975, President Francois Tombalbaye, who was responsible for much of the mistreatment of Muslim northerners, was assassinated. His successor, General Felix Malloum, attempted a policy of reconciliation with the rebels. Meanwhile, continuing dissension within FROLINAT resulted in Habre being replaced by Goukouni Oueddei as head of the movement. Although Habre signed an agreement with Malloum in 1977 which was hoped would lead to the formation of a new government to include FROLINAT, Goukouni’s refusal to cooperate caused the agreement to fall apart. FROLINAT launched a major offensive, which the Chadian army was able to counter only with French assistance.
A second attempt to form a new government was initially successful and, in August, 1977, Malloum retained the position of president while Habre became prime minister and formed a government. However, by the end of December, amidst renewed fighting, the agreement collapsed. Malloum’s army completely lost control of the north. Subsequent efforts to form a unified government failed. In 1980 serious warfare broke out. France, meanwhile, decided to pull its forces out of Chad, which it saw as another Vietnam. In the middle of the year the coalition opposing Habre, known by its initials as GUNT, enlisted Libyan aid to defeat Habre’s forces. Libya occuped northern Chad, and President Goukouni, who had replaced Malloum, pledged an eventual unification with Libya. Reliance on Libya was very unpopular among many of the groups within the coalition, and resulted in a weakening of the alliance against Habre. In 1982, Habre achieved a military victory and captured the capital, N’Djamena. Goukouni fled to Libya. Habre proclaimed himself president and set about to form a broadly representative government.
Chad faced an immediate threat from Libya, which armed Goukouni’s forces. By now Habre had backing from the United States and a reluctant France, which sent troops back into Chad. Libya, however still maintained control over much of the north until early 1988, when Habre’s forces pushed them out of the country.
Despite this victory, Habré's government was weak, and strongly opposed by members of the Zaghawa ethnic group. A rebel offensive in November 1990, which was led by Idriss Déby, a Zaghawa former army commander who had participated in a plot against Habré in 1989 and subsequently fled to Sudan, defeated Habré's forces. The French chose not to assist Habré on this occasion, allowing him to be ousted. It is possible that they actively aided Déby. Explanation and speculation regarding the reasons for France's abandonment of Habré include the adoption of a policy of non-interference in intra-Chadian conflicts, dissatisfaction with Habré's unwillingness to move towards multi-party democracy, and favoritism by Habré towards American rather than French companies with regard to oil development. Habré fled to Cameroon, and the rebels entered N'Djamena on December 2, 1990. Habré subsequently went into exile in Senegal.
Human rights groups hold Habré responsible for the killing of thousands of people, but the exact number is unknown. Killings included massacres against ethnic groups in the south (1984), against the Hadjerai (1987), and against the Zaghawa (1989). He authorized tens of thousands of political murders and physical torture. For these crimes, he received the nickname "the African Pinochet", after the brutal Chilean dictator.
Between 1993 and 2003, Belgium had universal jurisdiction legislation allowing the most serious violations of human rights to be tried in national as well as international courts, without any direct connection to the country of the alleged perpetrator, victims or where the crimes took place. Despite the repeal of the legislation, investigations against Habré went ahead and in September 2005 he was indicted for crimes against humanity, torture, war crimes and other human rights violations. Senegal, where Habré in exile, placed Habré under nominal house arrest in Dakar.
On March 17, 2006, the European Parliament demanded that Senegal turn over Habré to Belgium to be tried. Senegal did not comply, and it at first refused extradition demands from the African Union which arose after Belgium asked to try Habré. The ATDPH expressed its approval of the decision. If he were to be turned over, he would have become the first former dictator to be extradited by a third-party country to stand trial for human rights abuses. In 2007, Senegal set up its own special war-crimes court to try Habré under pressure from the African Union. On April 8, 2008, the National Assembly of Senegal voted to amend the constitution to clear the way for Habré to be prosecuted in Senegal. Ibrahima Gueye was appointed as trial coordinator in May 2008. A joint session of the National Assembly and the Senate voted in July 2008 to approve a bill empowering Senegalese courts to try people for crimes committed in other countries and for crimes that were committed more than ten years beforehand. This made it constitutionally possible to try Habré. Senegalese Minister of Justice Madicke Niang appointed four investigative judges on this occasion.
A 2007 movie by director Klaartje Quirijns, The Dictator Hunter, tells the story of the activists Souleymane Guengueng and Reed Brody who led the efforts to bring Habré to trial.
On August 15, 2008, a Chadian court sentenced Habré to death in absentia for war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with allegations that he had worked with rebels inside Chad to oust Déby. François Serres, a lawyer for Habré, criticized this trial on August 22 for unfairness and secrecy. According to Serres, the accusation on which the trial was based was previously unknown and Habré had not received any notification of the trial.
On September 16, 2008, 14 victims filed new complaints with a Senegalese prosecutor, accusing Habré of crimes against humanity and torture.
The Senegalese Government added an amendment in 2008, which would allow Habre to be tried in court. Senegal later changed their position, however, requesting 27 million euros in funding from the international community before going through with the trial. This prompted Belgium to pressure the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to force Senegal to either extradite Habre to Belgium or to proceed with the trial.
On July 8, 2011, Senegal officials announced that Habre would be extradited to Chad on July 11, 2011, but this was subsequently halted. In July 2012, the ICJ ruled that Senegal must start Habre's trial "without delay." Amnesty International called on Senegal to abide by the ICJ's ruling, calling it "a victory for victims that's long overdue". A trial by the International Criminal Court (ICC) was ruled out, because the cirmes took place before the ICC was fully established in 2002, and its jurisdiction is limited to events that took place before the ICC was fully established in 2002, and its jurisdiction is limited to events that took place after that date.
In December 2012, the Parliament of Senegal passed a law allowing for the creation of an international tribunal in Senegal to try Habre. The judges of the tribunal would be appointed by the African Union, and come from elsewhere in Africa.
On June 30, 2013, Habre was arrested in Senegal by the Senegalese police. Chadian President Idriss Deby said of Habre's arrest that it was a step towards "an Africa free of all evil, an Africa stripped of all dictatorships." Senegal's court, set up with the African Union, charged Habre with crimes against humanity and torture. That year he was also sentenced to death in absentia for crimes against humanity by a Chadian court.
On July 20, 2015, the trial of Hissene Habre began. Waiting for the trial to commence, Habre shouted: "Down with imperialists. [This trial] is a farce by rotten Senegalese politicians. African traitors. Valet of America." After this outburst, Habre was taken out of the courtroom and the trial began without him.
On July 21, 2015, Habre's trial was postponed to September 7, 2015, after his lawyers refused to participate in court.
On May 30, 2016, the Extraordinary African Chambers found Habre guilty of rape, sexual slavery, and ordering the killing 40,000 people during his tenure as Chadian president and sentenced him to life in prison in the Prison du Cap Manuel in Senegal. The guilty verdict marked the first time an African Union backed court convicted a former ruler of another country for crimes against humanity.
On April 7, 2020, a judge in Senegal granted Habre two months' leave from prison, as the jail was being used to hold new detainees in COVID-19 quarantine. After finishing his two months leave, Habre returned to prison on June 7, 2020.
Habre died in Senegal on August 24, 2021, a week after his 79th birthday, after being hospitalized in Dakar's main hospital with COVID-19. He had fallen ill while in jail a week earlier. In a statement, Habre's wife, Fatime Raymonne Habre, confirmed that Habre had succumbed to COVID-19.
Habre was buried in Yoff Muslim cemetery.
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Hissène Habré, Ex-President of Chad Jailed for War Crimes, Dies at 79
Mr. Habré, who received a life sentence for crimes against humanity including torture and sex offenses, was said to be out of prison for medical treatment at his death.
Ruth Maclean and
DAKAR, Senegal — Hissène Habré, the former president of Chad, died on Tuesday while serving a life sentence in Senegal for crimes against humanity, including killings, torture and sex offenses, during his rule in the 1980s. He was 79.
His death was confirmed by Lt. Mame Balla Faye, the director of the Cap Manuel prison in Senegal, the West African country where Mr. Habré was being held after being convicted there in 2016. Mr. Faye did not provide further details.
He was not in prison at his death, however, according to news media reports. He had spent 10 days in a nearby clinic receiving treatment for complications of diabetes and high blood pressure, Senegalese news media said. Some outlets reported that he had been infected with the coronavirus.
Mr. Habré was allowed out of prison for 60 days in April 2020 after a judge said he was particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus. His wife had long petitioned the Senegalese authorities to release him on health grounds even before the pandemic.
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Mr. Habré was the first former head of state to be convicted of crimes against humanity by another country’s courts.
A former defense minister, he took power in 1982 in a coup backed by the United States, and once in office he received weapons and assistance from France, Israel and the United States to keep Libya, Chad’s northern neighbor, at bay.
His rule was violent from the start. Prisoners of war and political opponents were killed. But the Reagan administration kept supplying him with weapons to keep up the fight against Libya, led by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.
A Chadian truth commission found that Mr. Habré’s government had killed more than 40,000 people believed to be enemies of the state, including those who had merely come under suspicion.
Mr. Habré lost power in 1990 the way he had taken it, in a coup. He then fled to Senegal, taking $12 million from the national bank accounts with him. For years he lived quietly in coastal Dakar, the country’s capital, buying properties there and remaining untroubled by the government of Abdoulaye Wade, which kept delaying his prosecution.
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It was the government of Mr. Wade’s successor, President Macky Sall, that tried him, setting up a special court with the African Union to do so — the Extraordinary African Chambers.
On the first day of his trial, Mr. Habré was dragged into the courtroom kicking and shouting insults at the judge. “Down with colonialism!” he said. Afterward he sat through the testimony of dozens of his victims, hiding his face behind a large white turban and sunglasses.
When he was convicted, those victims rejoiced, punched the air, cried and ululated in the court. They had fought for justice for decades.
But five years later, nearly 8,000 victims are still waiting for the $150 million in compensation they were jointly awarded.
“Since the trial, five years have passed. Nothing has been done,” said Clément Abaifouta, president of the Association of Victims of the Crimes of the Hissène Habré Regime. “The court of Dakar has not seized his property. The African Union, which is handling the case, does nothing. Up until now, Hissène Habré has not paid a single cent. Nothing.”
Mr. Abaifouta was arrested as a young student and spent four years in one of Mr. Habré’s notorious prisons, an experience that ruined his life, he said. He was forced to dig the graves of his friends and cellmates, many of whom died because the prison conditions were so bad. He became known as the “gravedigger.”
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Mr. Abaifouta said that Mr. Habré’s death would bring no relief to his victims, because many former subordinates had not faced justice and still permeated Chad’s government.
“Now, in Chad, you have governors, you have brigade commanders, commissioners, presidential advisers, all of whom worked with Hissène Habré,” he said. “So the victims are still scared, even if Hissène Habré is no longer there. They’re everywhere, these people.”
The imprisonment, killings and torture carried out by Mr. Habré’s secret police, the Directorate of Documentation and Security, became widely known, thanks in part to the meticulous documentation of victim testimonies by Souleymane Guengueng, a survivor who had almost died in jail. Mr. Guengueng promised himself that if he ever got out, he would bring his torturers to justice — and eventually, he did.
Reed Brody, who has worked with Mr. Habré’s victims for over two decades, said the former president would “go down in history as one of the world’s most pitiless dictators, a man who slaughtered his own people to seize and maintain power, who burned down entire villages, sent women to serve as sexual slaves for his troops and built clandestine dungeons to inflict medieval torture on his enemies.”
Mr. Habré’s successor and onetime army chief, Idriss Déby, died on the battlefield in April and was succeeded by his son Mahamat, a 37-year-old four-star military general.
Hissène Habré was born on Aug. 13, 1942, to a family of herders in Largeau, in northern Chad, then a colony of France. Excelling in school, he went to work for the French colonial administration and earned a scholarship to study in France, where he took up political science and law. Chad achieved full independence in 1960.
After his return to Chad in the early 1970s Mr. Habré joined an insurgent movement fighting against Chad’s first post-independence government. After that government was toppled in a military coup, he became prime minister for a short spell in a power-sharing agreement, but six months later it fell apart amid fighting between his forces and the national army. He became a rebel once more, leading the successful coup in 1982.
His survivors include his two wives, Fatime Hachem Habré and Fatime Raymonde Habré.
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Hissène Habré, Ex-President of Chad, Is Convicted of War Crimes
DAKAR, Senegal — Hissène Habré, the former president of Chad, was sentenced to life in prison after he was found guilty of crimes against humanity, torture and sex crimes on Monday, more than 20 years after the start of a campaign to hold him accountable for the suffering and death of tens of thousands of people.
Mr. Habré, who ruled Chad from 1982 to 1990, when he was deposed by the current president, Idriss Déby, stood trial before a special court in Senegal created to handle the case. Prosecutors had sought a life sentence, which he is expected to serve in Senegal.
“The systematic torture at such a large scale was his way of governing,” said Gberdao Gustave Kam, the presiding judge on a three-judge panel, who read a summary of the verdict. “Hissène Habré showed no compassion toward the victims or any regret about the massacres and rapes that were committed.”
Victims and relatives of victims screamed with joy after the verdict was announced. Mr. Habré, who had sat silently during the 90-minute hearing, raised his fists to supporters and shouted for several minutes until armed guards led him away.
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The fact that the trial even took place was considered a victory for many of the victims of Mr. Habré’s government. The case meandered through the judiciary in Belgium and elsewhere for years before landing in Senegal, where Mr. Habré, 73, fled after being forced from power.
On Monday morning, a group of about 30 victims and widows of victims slowly walked into the courthouse together, many graying and using canes, a testament to the time it had taken for the case to come to trial.
“This is a testimony to the perseverance of a band of victims, activists and supporters who made this trial happen,” said Reed Brody, a Human Rights Watch lawyer from New York who was influential in pursuing the case. “This trial was the result of the sweat and determination of the survivors.”
Several international human rights lawyers were in the gallery on Monday to hear the verdict, including the prosecutor who indicted Augusto Pinochet, the dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. Mr. Habré has been called the African Pinochet.
During the trial, which started in July, prosecutors presented secret-police archives that recorded the names of 12,321 prisoners, interrogation reports and information about the deaths in detention of more than 1,200 people.
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François Serres, Mr. Habré’s lawyer, has dismissed the records as “fakes.”
During the trial, defense attorneys said there was no evidence connecting Mr. Habré to crimes committed by others and contended that the prosecution was political. Mr. Habré’s son and other relatives were in court on Monday but declined to comment before the proceedings.
According to a Chadian truth commission, Mr. Habré’s government killed more than 40,000 people who were believed to be enemies of the state, or who had merely come under suspicion.
Evidence heard by the court, known as the Extraordinary African Chambers, included tales of torture and putrid conditions in prisons where Mr. Habré’s enemies were taken, sometimes without being given any reason for their detention.
Habré Sentenced to Life in Prison
Hissène Habré, the former president of Chad, was sentenced on Monday to life in prison for war crimes.
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Testimony involving sex crimes also figured in the trial. One woman described Mr. Habré’s raping her, insisting when a judge interrupted that she be allowed to continue her testimony in public so that the world could know what the former president had done.
On Monday, the judges specifically convicted Mr. Habré of that rape.
Others testified about relatives who had disappeared, and former prisoners described being wounded after their limbs were tied behind their backs.
One former prisoner, Clément Abaifouta, said in an interview that he could never forget the horrors he had seen in jail. Mr. Abaifouta, who was in court for the verdict, had worked in a prison kitchen and a laundry room before he was ordered to take on a new role, as gravedigger.
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“What broke my life is the fact that I buried about 1,000 people,” he said. “With all that Habré did, we could cut him into pieces and it wouldn’t satisfy everyone.”
Mr. Habré was first indicted in 2000. The setting of the trial in Senegal offered a peculiarity: the courts of one country prosecuting the former leader of another in a human rights case.
The trial proceeded with the blessing of the African Union, even though the organization has long complained that Africans are often singled out before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
The Hague court had no jurisdiction in this case because its authority is limited to events that took place after it was fully established in 2002. But the International Court of Justice, the highest United Nations court, ordered Senegal to try Mr. Habré or extradite him for trial elsewhere. This prompted Senegal to create a special court with the backing of the African Union.
The three-judge panel, with two judges from Senegal and one from Burkina Faso, used Senegalese law to reach the verdict.
Mr. Habré took power during a coup that was covertly aided by the United States, and he received weapons and assistance from France, Israel and the United States to keep Libya, to the north of Chad, and Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, then the Libyan leader, at bay.
At the beginning of the case, Mr. Habré was a combative defendant, brought into court by force after refusing to participate in the hearings. Some of his supporters started a website denouncing the trial and his treatment by the court.
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Mr. Habré often wore sunglasses and a turban during testimony, rarely turning to look at the more than 90 witnesses, according to courtroom observers. He dressed in a similar fashion on Monday, looking more like a nomad facing a sandstorm than a former president on trial.
Suleyman Guengueng, a political prisoner during the Habré years who documented the abuses he saw while in detention, was in the courtroom on Monday to hear the verdict and said he hoped the trial would send a message to dictators around the world, as well as to their victims.
“To all the dictators violating human rights in the world, this can happen,” Mr. Guengueng said. “To all their victims, don’t shut your mouth. Open your mouth.”
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