WASHINGTON (Islam Online) Former Chadian Leader, Hussein Habre, was indicted this week in Dakar, Senegal. Habre, who governed Chad for most of the 1980s, was escorted to a courtroom by Senegalese police guards. The former Chadian leader denied all the charges while standing before a judge who had spent the week listening to Chadian citizens testify to the tortures they said Habre ordered.
Boucounta Diallo, the lawyer acting for human rights groups that brought the case said even though no date has been set for the trial, Mr. Habre has been indicted and placed under house of arrest for acts of torture and barbarity. Habre, now 57 years old, has been accused of 97 political killings, 142 cases of torture and 100 of disappearing persons.
Indicting Mr.Habre sets the stage for Africa's first Pinochet-style human rights trial. This is the first time an African head of state has been brought to court in another country on human rights offenses.
Habre's case is a test on a continent where such abuses of power have been rife and a signal to other leaders like him in Somalia, Burundi and Sierra Leone, that one day, they may ultimately be held accountable for their deviant acts.
"My country is setting an example for Africa by showing that Africans can take care of their own problems. The time when brutal despots could just take their bank accounts and move next door is coming to an end," said Alioune Tine of the African Assembly for the Defense of Human Rights in Dakar.
In New York, Reed Brody, advocacy director of Human Rights Watch, which contributed to Habre's indictment, had this to say, "First of all, this would be unthinkable in most African countries. This is the first time to my knowledge that any African has been held for human rights crimes other than in the country in which the crimes were committed -much less a former head of state. And it's the first time outside of the Pinochet case that a former head of state has been arrested for human rights violations anywhere in the world."
The Pinochet case, in which Britain considered extraditing the retired general to Spain to face charges for crimes allegedly committed during his 17-year rule in Chile, was followed closely in Africa even before Habre's alleged victims brought their case.
The notion that a former head of state could be prosecuted abroad for human rights violations caught the attention of many on the continent. Warlords in Somalia, where murder is part of the order of the day and brutality a common tool of war, have been following every twist in the case.
During the days of Mengistu Haile Mariam, the former Ethiopian ruler was accused of causing the deaths of 1 million citizens. He ventured into South Africa for medical treatment and had to run back to his refuge in Zimbabwe to avoid twin legal maneuvers. Trying him in South Africa was not successful because other groups were seeking his extradition to Ethiopia prior to the final judgement, his natural death.
Chadian victims of torture and survivors of a campaign of political killings who organized themselves into the Chadian Association of Victims of Political Repression and Crime did the research for the case shortly after Habre fled to Senegal. The association prepared files on what each person reported enduring at the hands of Habre's secret police force.
The accounts originally were intended for the truth commission organized by Idris Deby, the general who replaced Habre. However, the commission took no further action after concluding that Habre's government had killed 40,000 people and tortured 200,000. The victims' organization fell moribund until Pinochet's arrest in London in October 1998, which prompted Chadian attorneys to seek the assistance of Human Rights Watch.
Pursuing Habre, "the decisive factor was that he was in Senegal," Brody said. "If there's a candidate in Africa to do the right thing, it's Senegal." The nation was proud of being the first in Africa to ratify a treaty last year on creating an international human rights tribunal.
Importantly, it not only ratified the 1984 U.N. Convention Against Torture, under which Britain honored Spain's warrant on Pinochet. The African country had also incorporated the convention's precepts into the Senegalese criminal code.
