Hissein Habré, une tragédie tchadienne

Spoken: French/Arabic. Subtitles: English.

During the eight years of Hissein Habré’s reign of terror as president of Chad from 1982 to 1990, Habré and the DDS, the political police he deployed to destroy any opposition to his dictatorship, killed nearly 40,000 people. When he was overthrown in 1990, he fled to Senegal. Due to 16 years of hard work by the Association of the Victims of the Hissein Habré Regime (AVHHR), Senegalese officials finally arrested Habré and in 2015 put him on trial for crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture. In his documentary, through direct-to-camera interviews and sequences where Clement Abaifouta, chairman of AVHHR, converses with victims, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun, who himself went into exile during Habré’s reign of terror, paints a painfully clear picture of the savagery inflicted on perfectly innocent people. On May 30, 2016, several months after Haroun’s documentary was released, the Senegalese court sentenced Habré to life imprisonment.