Former dictator of Chad dies in prison
Convicted of crimes against humanity
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, died Tuesday at a hospital in Dakar, Senegal, where he was serving a life sentence. He was 79.
Local news outlets reported that Habré had recently contracted COVID-19.
Known as “Africa’s Pinochet” — the brutal Chilean ruler of the 1970s and 1980s — 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.
The son of a shepherd, Habré was educated in Paris in the years after 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. Habré long enjoyed the support of the U.S, which regarded Chad as a counterweight to its neighbour Libya, then rule by Col. Moammar Gadhafi.
Habré kept his hold on power with the aid of a secret police service. 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. Habré was accused of forcing women into sexual slavery for his troops.
Habré, who after losing power allegedly left Chad with more than $11 million, took exile in Senegal and lived in what were called 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 offences, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity, are so severe that the alleged perpetrator may be prosecuted in the court of any nation.
Indicted in Senegal in 2000, Habré was convicted 16 years later on charges including crimes against humanity and torture. He was sentenced to life in prison.
According to The Associated Press, Habré had two wives, one Chadian and one Senegalese, and kept two villas at his home in exile in Dakar, one for each family.