Michela Wrong

The butcher of Chad who died in a private Senegalese clinic

It took 16 years to bring Hissène Habré to justice – but the brutal former president ended his days simply constrained by an electronic bracelet

Hissène Habré on an official visit to Paris in 1989. Credit: Alamy 
issue 17 December 2022

Recent years have not been kind to the campaign for universal justice. The notion that some crimes are so serious that perpetrators should be hunted down and prosecuted irrespective of where the atrocities were actually committed has taken something of a beating since the International Criminal Court (ICC) opened for business in the Hague in 2002.

Just this August, William Ruto, a politician once charged with crimes against humanity by the ICC, was voted president of Kenya, wresting power from Uhuru Kenyatta, who had faced identical charges before the same court. A lawyer accused of witness-tampering in their cases then died in what looked very like a poisoning. So much for ending impunity for the ethnically targeted violence that swept Kenya after its 2007 polls.

The ICC itself has come under criticism for the fact that the overwhelming majority of those appearing in the dock are black Africans, while US, British and Israeli politicians who might arguably be held to account for ordering invasions, punitive operations or approving assassinations go free. Universal justice as currently practised, say its critics, is both racist and partial.

It’s a sobering narrative, but this book offers something of a corrective. It tells the story of how the late Hissène Habré, a Chadian dictator once cynically supported by France and the US, was successfully prosecuted for the summary execution and torture of thousands of his own citizens, becoming the first former head of state to be personally convicted for rape.

There was nothing swift or simple about the process. It took an astonishing 16 years of complex legal and diplomatic manoeuvring before the former president, living in luxurious exile in Senegal, was dragged kicking and screaming into a court.

Reed Brody, the author of To Catch a Dictator, was a young man lobbying for the establishment of an international court on behalf of the US group Human Rights Watch when the 1998 arrest in London of the retired Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet galvanised the international human rights landscape, making possible what had once seemed out of bounds.

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