Former Chadian President Hissène Habré died Tuesday at the age of 79 in Senegal where he was sentenced to life in prison in 2016 for crimes against humanity by an African court.
Hissène Habré succumbed to Covid-19 at the main hospital in Dakar, the Chadian consulate told AFP.
He was taken there urgently after his deteriorating state of health at a private clinic in the Senegalese capital where his family had him taken from prison a few days ago, the consulate said.
"Habré has been handed over to his Lord," Senegalese justice minister Malick Sall told TFM.
Sentenced after an unprecedented trial
Hissène Habré, who ruled Chad from 1982 to 1990, was sentenced on May 30, 2016 to life imprisonment after an unprecedented trial in Dakar, after being convicted of crimes against humanity, rape , executions, slavery and kidnapping.
A Chadian commission of inquiry estimated the number of victims of the repression under the Habré regime at 40,000.
Hissène Habré, overthrown in 1990, had found refuge in Senegal, where, under international pressure, the conditions for his trial had been created and where he was arrested in 2013 and indicted by a special tribunal established in cooperation with the African Union. .
Student in France
Born in 1942 in Faya-Largeau (north), he grew up in the Djourab desert, among nomadic shepherds.
Intelligent, he is noticed by his masters.
Having become a sub-prefect, he left to study in France in 1963, at the Institut des Hautes Etudes d'Outre-Mer.
He then studied law in Paris, attended the Institute of Political Studies there and made his political education by devouring Frantz Fanon, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Raymond Aron.
Returning to Chad in 1971, he joined the Front de liberation nationale du Tchad (Frolinat), of which he was the head, before founding with another northerner, Goukouni Weddeye, the council of the Armed Forces of the North (Fan).
He was Prime Minister
From 1974, he became known abroad by holding hostage - for three years - the French ethnologist Françoise Claustre, forcing France to negotiate with the rebellion.
He will then be Prime Minister of President Félix Malloum, with whom he will break, then Minister of Defense of Goukouni Weddeye, President of the Government of National Unity created in 1979.
West ally against Gaddafi
A convinced nationalist and fiercely opposed to the Libyan leader of the time Muammar Gadhafi, who had the sympathies of Weddeye, he broke shortly after with his former ally, triggering a civil war in N'Djamena, which he had to evacuate at the end of 1980.
From eastern Chad, where he resumed the maquis, he fought Goukouni Weddeye supported by Tripoli, to return victoriously to N'Djamena in 1982.
His regime, supported against Gaddafi by France and the United States, will last eight years.
This period was marked by terrible repression: opponents - real or supposed - were arrested by the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS, political police), tortured, often executed.
A commission of inquiry will estimate at more than 40,000 the number of people who died in detention or executed during his reign, including 4,000 identified by name.
In December 1990, Habré hurriedly left N'Djamena, fleeing the lightning attack by the rebels of Idriss Déby Itno, one of his generals who defected 18 months earlier and invaded the country from Sudan.
President Déby, killed in April 2021 by rebels from Libya, will rule Chad with an iron fist for 30 years.
Driven from power, Habré finds refuge in Dakar for an exile that will be peaceful for more than twenty years.
He was finally arrested on June 30, 2013 in Dakar and then charged by a special tribunal created under an agreement between the African Union and Senegal.
His trial, the first in the world in which a former head of state is brought before a court in another country for alleged human rights violations, opens on July 20, 2015.
On May 30, 2016, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes, crimes against humanity, torture and rape.
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