The victims of the former Chadian dictator Hissène Habré are still waiting to receive the compensation ordered by the justice, seven years after his historic conviction in Senegal in 2016, said Friday, May 26, 2023 seven Chadian and international organizations. A few days before this anniversary, two victims died again.
On 30 May 2016, Habré was sentenced to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture, including sexual violence and rape, by a Senegalese court supported by the African Union. Habré subsequently died in August 2021. Following a separate trial in Chad on 25 March 2015, a Criminal Court sentenced 20 operatives of the Habré regime for torture and murder. Both courts have ordered millions of dollars in compensation for victims. The African Union and the Government of Chad should respect their obligations to victims resulting from these court decisions, the organisations said.
“The victims of Habré are heroes who have fought tirelessly for 25 years to bring their dictator and his minions to justice, and have been awarded millions of dollars in compensation, but to date they have not received a single penny of these reparations.”, noted Jacqueline Moudeina, the victims’ main lawyer. Two of the most active victims have just died, and many are in very poor health and desperately need these repairs.”
On 15 May 2023, Ginette Ngarbaye, who was tortured and raped and gave birth in a secret prison in Habré, died of a long illness. She was secretary of the Association of Victims of Crimes and Repressions of the Hissène Habré regime (AVCRHH) and one of the key witnesses at Habré’s trial. The same day, Fatime Kagone Tchangdoum, whose husband had been murdered by Habré’s security forces in 1983 and who had become an AVCRHH activist, also died. According to the victims group, approximately 400 direct and indirect victims have died since the 2016 verdict.
The trial of Hissène Habré, the only court in the world to convict a former leader of another state for war crimes and crimes against humanity, has been viewed by many observers as “a turning point for justice in Africa.” The African Union welcomed this judgment “significant in that it reinforces the principle advocated by the African Union of finding African solutions to African problems.”
When an Appeals Chamber confirmed Habré’s conviction in April 2017, granting 82 billion CFA francs (about 130 million dollars) to 7,396 identified victims, it commissioned an African Union trust fund to raise money by searching for Habré’s assets and soliciting voluntary contributions. Although the African Union has allocated $5 million to the trust fund, it is still not operational.
In September 2021, following Habré’s death and renewed international interest in the fate of the victims, the African Union sent a delegation to Chad, where it took possession of a building intended for the Fund, which it described as “a turning point in the reparation process” for victims. An AU official said the AU commission was working “to operationalize the fund as soon as possible.” It will be almost a year before a second AU delegation arrives in August 2022 to “set up the provisional secretariat of the fund, […] establish a work plan and set out the modalities of the reparation process”. But she left Chad without having done so.
On 19 September 2022, the Chadian Presidency wrote to the Trust Fund to announce that the government had allocated 10 billion CFA francs (16.5 million dollars). However, according to the AU, this money was not received. On 2 May 2023, Chad’s transitional president, Mahamat Idriss Déby Itno, told a delegation of the victims group that he had asked the Minister of Finance to make Chad’s contribution available to the victims.
In the Chadian trial of Habré’s henchmen, the Criminal Court of N’Djamena also granted 75 billion CFA francs (about 119 million dollars) in compensation to 7,000 victims, on the charge that the Chadian state would pay half and the other half. The court also ordered the government to erect a monument “within one year” in honour of those killed under the Habré regime, and to create a museum within the headquarters of the former political police (Directorate of Documentation and Security, DDS), where detainees were tortured. The government has not implemented any of these decisions to date.
“The African Union and the Chadian government must work together and implement these court decisions so that victims can finally receive reparations for what we have suffered,” said Adoumbaye Dam Pierre. President of the Association of Victims of Crimes of the Hissène Habré Regime (AVCRHH), a prisoner under the Habré regime. “We have fought for decades for these judgments, and now we have to fight for them to finally be enforced.”
The one-party regime of Hissène Habré (1982-1990) was marked by massive and widespread atrocities, including targeted ethnic repression and sexual and gender-based violence.
The seven organizations calling on the African Union and the Government of Chad to grant reparations are: Amnesty International, the Association of Victims of Crimes of the Hissène Habré Regime (AVCRHH), the Chadian Association for the Promotion and Defence of Human Rights (ATPDH), Human Rights Watch, the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ), REDRESS and the Rose Lokissim Association.
