Gift for this Commie Murderous Regime - a lesson and a warning

Hague Court to Decide Where Former Dictator of Chad Will Be Tried

The New York Times
Marlise Simons
March 12, 2012

PARIS — International judges in The Hague are hearing a complex case this week that boils down to a single and unusual question: which country has the right to try Hissène Habré, the former president of Chad, who has been indicted in two nations in connection with political killings, torture and a host of other brutalities.

Senegal and Belgium have both charged Mr. Habré, but Senegal, where he now lives, has stalled any legal action for more than a decade, while refusing repeated extradition requests from Brussels.

The case has now landed before the International Court of Justice, the highest United Nations court that settles disputes between nations. Public hearings began Monday and are expected to last more than a week.

Mr. Habré, however, may not be in imminent danger of landing in any dock: now 69, he has lived undisturbed in his luxury villa in Dakar, Senegal’s capital, since he fled a rebellion at home in 1990.

His fearsome rule, from 1982 to 1990, has been largely forgotten in a region where other strongmen and conflicts have since monopolized the news.

Mr. Habré’s rise and fall played out during an earlier period of instability in North Africa: he received extensive support from Western countries, including the United States and France, which saw Chad, a former French colony, as a counterweight to its troublemaking neighbor to the north, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya.

The Reagan administration provided covert support to help Mr. Habré take power in 1982 and provided him with military aid.

Mr. Habré turned that arsenal against his own people. The Chad Truth Commission said in 1992 that his government had killed up to 40,000 opponents and tortured many others. Survivors of the prisons run by the dreaded political police have described atrocities, including the torture and killing of fellow prisoners.

Although Chad is among the world’s poorest nations, Mr. Habré is said to have acquired a sizable fortune. The truth commission found that even during the final days of his rule, he stole more than $11 million from Chad’s central bank and the treasury, and ordered his soldiers to pillage other funds from the provinces.

He is said to have used some of that fortune in Senegal to buy political and legal protection and to shield himself from unfavorable media accounts. When he arrived in Senegal, local newspapers reported that a bank in downtown Dakar had to temporarily close to count the cash that arrived in suitcases on Mr. Habré’s plane.

In 2000, a Senegal court charged him with crimes against humanity, including “acts of torture and acts of barbarity.”

But the government has thrown up successive legal and financial hurdles to avoid putting Mr. Habré on trial. Senegal has said that it would conduct the trial if other countries would pay for it, at a cost, the president said, of about $36 million.

Several times, Senegal has also threatened to send Mr. Habré back to Chad, where Senegal says he could be tried and rights advocates say he would be more likely to be tortured or summarily executed. He has already been sentenced there in absentia to death.

The African Union, which has often criticized a different court in The Hague, the International Criminal Court, whose indictments so far have all involved African cases, has urged a reluctant Senegal to try Mr. Habré “in the name of Africa,” rather than see him prosecuted in Europe.

“Senegal is doing its best in a time frame we consider reasonable,” Cheikh Tidiane Thiam, director of legal affairs at Senegal’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters in The Hague on Monday.

Belgium also wants to try the former dictator, based on a complaint filed by a group of Mr. Habré’s victims, among them Belgian citizens. They say that while Senegal has delayed action, a number of victims and witnesses have died. After lengthy investigations, Belgium issued an international arrest warrant in 2005, charging Mr. Habré with crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture.

But Senegal still insists that it plans to prosecute Mr. Habré, and has turned down three extradition requests from Brussels, which decided to take its case to The Hague in 2009.

Belgium argues that Senegal is in violation of the international convention on torture, which holds that countries holding people accused of torture must either prosecute them or hand them over for trial elsewhere.

Reed Brody, counsel for Human Rights Watch, who has led a long campaign on behalf of victims of the Habré government, said the issue could not be clearer: “Senegal has an international obligation to prosecute or extradite. It has been 21 years and nothing has happened.”

The court could take several months to announce its finding.