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Chad battles bloody history
25/01/2006 10:36 - (SA)
Khartoum - When Sabadet Totodet died in Chad three weeks ago, survivors of a barbarous military dictatorship added yet another victim to tens of thousands of deaths blamed on former ruler Hissene Habre, whose fate has been put into the hands of African leaders.
Scores of alleged victims have died since Habre was overthrown in 1990 and others endure a legacy of physical and mental handicaps while the man dubbed the "butcher of Chad" lives freely despite an international indictment for crimes against humanity, according to Chad's Association of Victims of Crime and Political Repression.
On Tuesday, African leaders gathered for a summit here said they would form a committee of African jurists to decide within six months what should happen to Habre.
"For 15 years we have been crying for justice," Clement Abaifouta, who was detained for four years in the same overcrowded house as Totodet, said in an interview.
Case shouldn't be tried in Belgium
He said Totodet was just 42-years-old but had been sickly ever since their release in 1989. He died of tuberculosis. Three other cellmates in their 40s died last year, he said.
"People died from torture in prison, they died from diseases contracted there, they died because there was no medical care, they died of asphyxiation because we were crammed like sardines and there wasn't enough air."
Like many of those prisoners, he said he does not know why he was detained, but that it came after he was awarded a scholarship to study sociology in East Germany.
In detention, he volunteered for burial duty because it got him out of the cramped conditions every day, he said. "I buried so many bodies that to this day I remain unmoved by the sight of a corpse."
The African leaders expressed a preference Tuesday for "an African solution" to the case of the alleged atrocities during Habre's 1982-1990 rule.
A truth commission in Chad already had estimated that Habre's regime killed 40 000 of its citizens.
The case is loaded with implications for African presidents, who include coup leaders and others accused of human rights violations. It could set a precedent for others living in comfortable exile, such as Liberian Charles Taylor, who started a 10-year civil war and sponsored rebels who began the war in Sierra Leone.
Sitting leaders also could be targeted. Human Rights Watch, which is helping the victims pursue their case, notes that current Chadian coup leader Idriss Deby was head of Habre's secret police until he turned against him.
Habre's lawyer told reporters at the conference on Tuesday that the case should not be tried in Belgium, considered among the most brutal of Africa's colonisers.
"It's unacceptable to hand over an African leader to Belgium, which must bear ultimate responsibility for the assassination of (Zairian) leader Patrice Lumumba and the genocides in Rwanda and Congo," Mustafa Diouf said.
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