Former detainees recount harrowing moments in Habre's prisons

The night before he was to travel to Europe on a university scholarship, Clement Abaifouta says he was jailed by agents of ex-Chadian leader Hissene Habre. For the next four years, instead of attending lectures he dug graves for fellow Chadians allegedly executed by Habre’s police. Abaifouta’s crime? He was suspected of preparing to join a rebellion. And when agents tried to force him to admit this, he refused. “And that got me four years in prison.” He was in a cell of two or three square metres with at least 100 other people, he told IRIN in the Senegalese capital, Dakar. “We hardly ate. My family knew nothing of me; I knew nothing of them.” “In that prison, everything was aimed solely at breaking people down and killing them.” He recalled one prisoner being shot when he tried to get some water, “because he hadn’t asked permission to drink.” Days after Senegalese authorities detained Habre – who is accused of torturing and killing tens of thousands of people – former political prisoners are encouraged that justice might be done but are holding their celebration for the day Habre is actually judged. For Abaifouta, Habre’s freedom is excruciating. He said since his detention he is chronically tired, often falls ill, and cannot work for more than three or four hours at a time without getting sick. “Here I am, a broken man, and he is still free.” A Senegalese court is expected to decide within days whether to uphold an international warrant for Habre’s arrest and extradition issued by a Belgian court in September. If the court rules in favour of extradition, President Abdoulaye Wade would then have to sign an order to hand Habre over. Djimadoumadji N’garkete Bainde, one of the Chadians who filed suit against Habre in Belgium in 2001, said he lost 29 members of his family to the Habre regime. One who survived – his cousin – still sees her torturers occasionally in the Chadian capital, N’djamena, Bainde told IRIN. “Four of Habre’s men raped her on top of her father’s corpse," he said. “Habre burnt entire villages. He poisoned wells. He put guns in the hands of children as young as eight years old,” he said by phone from Liege, Belgium, where he is director of a centre for African youth. A Chadian truth commission in 1992 accused Habre’s government – in power from 1982 to 1990 – of 40,000 political assassinations and systematic torture. Habre is also accused of draining the Chadian treasury. A report by Human Rights Watch – which for years has been working with Chadian torture victims – cites methods such as forcing a vehicle’s exhaust pipe into a person’s mouth then accelerating the motor, administering electric shocks, and binding the head with sticks and a cord. Not all of Habre’s alleged victims were Chadian. Former prisoner Abaifouta said he saw detainees from several African countries, including Cameroon, Mali, Senegal, Sudan and Togo. Abdourahmane Gueye, a Senegalese who spent nearly seven months in a Chadian prison, accused Habre of stripping him of absolutely everything, including his entire livelihood and his close friend. Gueye had been a merchant based in Bangui, the capital of neighbouring Central African Republic, when he was taken into custody by government officials during a business trip to Chad in 1987 with his partner and friend, Demba Gaye. They were separated during formalities at the N’djamena airport, Gueye told IRIN in Dakar. “It was the last time I saw Demba Gaye.” Only months into his own prison stay did Gueye learn – from Abaifouta who shared a cell with Gaye – that his friend had died in detention. Gueye said he fell gravely ill in prison. It was only thanks to intervention by Senegalese diplomats and ultimately then-president Abdou Diouf that he survived, he told IRIN. He said security agents accused him of spying for Libya. They handed him a blank piece of paper, ordering him to sign it at the bottom. “Of course, I refused,” he said. “They put the paper aside then and said, ‘You’ll see.’” “Fortunately I was not tortured, but Hissene Habre did horrific things to the Chadian people. I saw Chadians tortured. I saw them being taken away to be executed.” ‘Turn this dark page’ The government of President Idriss Deby – currently struggling to defuse grave dissension within the armed forces – said in a communique on Wednesday it is time for Chad finally to move past the “tragic period” of Habre’s rule. “The judgement of Hissene Habre will have meaning only if it permits the Chadian people to definitively turn this dark page in its history and render justice to the victims and their families.” The statement said the people must take lessons from the Habre affair “to safeguard the country from any return to dictatorship or to the means used by Hissene Habre during his reign.” A number of Habre-era officials hold government posts under Deby, who was an advisor to Habre until he took power in a coup in 1990. Victims tensely await Senegal’s next move Bainde, the plaintiff in Belgium, said victims are anxiously awaiting word from Senegal. “Senegal absolutely must not say this is an innocent man in their midst and protect him….If Senegal says no to extradition, we all will be utterly shattered.” Abaifouta said despite the gifts Habre is known to make regularly to fellow Muslims in Dakar, the Senegalese people must see that the ex-leader is not the good Muslim some think he is. “He is a criminal – a criminal without equal.The ‘teranga’ of Senegal has been completely abused by Hissene Habre,” Abaifouta said, using the Wolof word for hospitality. “The Senegalese people must say, ‘no more; we will no longer abuse our teranga by harbouring a villain.’ “President Wade must save the honour of the African people.”