Hissène Habré
Hissène Habré ruled Chad for eight years with American and French backing against Gaddafi, killed something like forty thousand people doing it, and was the first former head of state convicted by a court in another African country. He was a Toubou from the northern desert, educated in Paris as a protégé of the French administration, who joined the northern rebellion against the southern-dominated government in 1971. He came to notice in 1974 by kidnapping a French archaeologist, Françoise Claustre, and holding her for three years. The civil war of the late 1970s put him in Ndjamena as prime minister in 1978 and drove him out again in 1980, when Goukouni Oueddei, his rival from the same north, brought in Libyan troops. That made him useful. The CIA and France armed him from Sudan, and in June 1982 he took the capital and the presidency, and for the rest of the decade fought Libya for the Aouzou Strip in a war of pickup trucks with machine guns mounted on them that ended in 1987 with the Libyans driven out and their base at Ouadi Doum captured with its aircraft. Inside the country his political police, the DDS, ran prisons whose registers, found in 2001 in an abandoned building, recorded the deaths of over a thousand named prisoners and the arrests of twelve thousand, and whose methods included the tyre-strangling the survivors testified to. His own army commander, Idriss Déby, overthrew him in December 1990 and he fled to Senegal, where he lived in a villa in Dakar for twenty-two years while his victims' lawyers pursued him through Belgian courts, the International Court of Justice and the African Union. The Extraordinary African Chambers, a court Senegal set up under AU authority, convicted him in 2016 of crimes against humanity, torture and rape and sentenced him to life. He died in a Dakar hospital of Covid in 2021.
- Lived: 1942 CE – 2021 CE
- Nationality: Chadian
- Roles: dictator, head_of_state, military
