The death of Chadian dictator Hissène Habré, hero with hands full of blood – archyworldys

Hissène Habré will never have poured out much on History, the one he made, the one he suffered, that of his crimes. Of a man who had nevertheless had, for a time, the charm of the devil, the charm of the word as of the action, it only remained at the end, only imprecations without tail or head, at bottom already a silence. final.

So he went, in a fog of indifference, swept away Tuesday, August 24 by the Covid-19 in a Senegalese prison where he was serving a life sentence which, for once, will have been applied to the letter; unless it’s the other way around, a way to escape his pain. This sort of irony probably wouldn’t have amused him, but what ever really amused Hissène Habré?

He ended up being nothing more than a restless detainee in white boubou, during his appearances before the Extraordinary African Chambers, in Dakar, until his conviction for crimes against humanity in 2016 (confirmed on appeal the following year ) for having presided over the organization of state abuses in Chad which he had led, between 1982 and 1990, the date of his first death. In December of that year, he had fled N’Djamena, the capital, having taken care to empty the coffers of the central bank, instead of keeping his bombastic promise to die in a last fight against the forces. of his ex-commander-in-chief, Idriss Déby, a man he had moreover tried to kill, without success.

The latter entered the city in December 1990 at the head of his own rebels and with discreet French support, thereby signaling, if by chance any doubt remained in this regard, that the time for Paris to let go had indeed come. . The other irony was that the same Idriss Déby died almost at the same time, but the first, only four months ago, in April. In combat, him.

If Hissène Habré had an awakening conscience, perhaps she had offered him the opportunity, before the final extinction, to wonder about the meaning of things abandoned behind him. On these fights, lost or won, but also on the heaps of corpses and mutilated, damaged, gnawed bodies which marked his route, especially during the most sumptuous hours of a violent existence.

“Quintessence of a desert warrior”

But the former Chadian president, the former Chadian rebel, the former torturer, the former hostage taker, the former Western pawn, the former manipulator of Western forces, went without giving any other sign than the inexhaustible anger of an old man, unable to formulate a semblance of an honorable fine, determined to evade everything, starting with financial reparations set by the courts, 30,000 euros for each of the plaintiffs.

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