At a glance, the
killing fields of N’Djamena aren’t
recognizable. On the outskirts of the
Chadian capital, passed the walls of a
prison never quite completed because of
embezzled funds, nothing indicates that
under the vast desolate sahelien
landscape hides the burial grounds of
Hissene Habre’s victims. One man is
still able to tell where the millions of
corpses dragged out the prisons of the
ex-dictator lie. For five years, Clement
Abaifouta came to bury the dead under
this barren soil, without even the time
for a prayer.
In 1990, at the end
of his eight years in power, the
president fled from N’Djamena fearing
the advancing rebel troops of his future
successor, Idriss Deby, and to this day
resides in exile in Senegal. Since his
arrival in power in 1982, he hunted down
all opponents and conspirators, real or
imagined, and N’Djamena became the
capital of detention centers and
“torture chambers”, and a place of
persecution where, as was later
determined by a national commission,
“over 40,000 victims (dead), over 80,000
orphans, over 30,000 widows, and over
200,000 people found themselves because
of this oppression without any moral or
material support”.
Clement Abaifouta
was merely a prisoner among others,
arrested on a “rainy morning”, July 12th,
1985, when they decided that his
scholarship to study medicine in East
Germany was suspicious. The men who
brought him to the headquarters of the
terrifying Documentation and Security
Offices (“Direction de la Documentation
et de la Securite”, DDS) never indicated
to him the reason for his arrest. They
needed someone for a dirty job; he was
assigned to bury the victims.
For 5 years,
Clement Abaifouta was part a small unit
of enslaved gravediggers, lining up
wholes and communal tombs over a two
kilometer stretch of the killing fields.
“We would ask ourselves how so many
people could die. The corpses would come
by the truck load. Often they were
already swollen. We would dig, but not
very deeply, and we would hurry away.”
A French military
camp was located less then a kilometer
way. “The French came several times
flying overhead with their helicopter;
they must have known what we were doing”
assured Clement. The grave sites didn’t
seem to be a point of contention between
the Chadian president and his allies,
the Americans and the French who back
then supported Habre with enthusiasm at
a time when Chad was at war with Libya.
While the Chadian army, financed by US
and supported by French Jaguars, was
fighting back the enemy and making
advances on Kadhafi’s territory, they
were torturing in all tranquility back
in N’Djamena. According to Human Rights
Watch, the Chad of Hissene Habre was
receiving help from American experts in
“interrogation methods” and assistance
from Saddam Hussein.
Hissene Habre can
hardly claim he’s had nothing to do with
this. Documents written to the intention
of the Chief of State detail the
tortures subjected to certain “special”
prisoners. The ex-dictator was keeping a
personal watch on his secret police, as
shown in a note dated from August 26th,
1987, and written by the Director of the
DDS, congratulating himself that “the
spider web sown over the entire extend
of the national territory”, due to his
services, constituted “the eyes and the
ears of the president”, to whom he
“accounted for all activities”. Certain
witnesses even accuse Habre of having
personally participated in certain
executions.
The “investigation
center”, one of the uppermost places of
torture, was located in the heart of the
“presidency”, the neighborhood inhabited
by the dignitaries of the regime. Today,
the ancient prison is in ruin and behind
the bushes of rusted barb wire squatters
have moved in tents under its leaky
roofs.
A man with a fixed
gaze, his face devoured by tics, stops
all access to the ruins for which he
affirms having all responsibility
because, he solemnly adds, “it was I who
had the keys.” The regime has fallen,
the presidency and its prisons pillaged,
but Moustahamid Idriss, the guardian of
the “investigation center” remains and
still gets euphoric at the memory of
years spent in good and faithful
service.
“We had a secret
dungeon in the garden over there that
was condemned by the bulldozers when
Hissene Habre left”, explains the old
prison guard. “You had to go down a
little staircase to get to it. There
were always lots of prisoners there.”
The villa was inhabited by an officer of
the regime who had organized his own
little private detention center, as many
others had done, including the
president’s own sister. “I was just
obeying orders, that’s all” Moustahamid
quickly concluded.
Only several
hundred feet away, Hissene Habre was
receiving confidential notes about the
“special” prisoners. In a 500 meter
radius, five detention centers operated,
of which three at least were kept
covert. Next to these centers, multiple
informal “torture chambers” were
established.
None were as feared
as the “pool”. The old pool at Leclerc’s,
a French colonialist, had been sealed
with a concrete slab and divided into 10
cells, were bodies, broken, tortured,
exhausted, sick, and dehydrated from the
infernal heat, were cast off to die.
“It’s the salt that’s first to come out
of a body. After that comes big red
welts, very painful, that secrete puss,
then the agony begins”, recalls Ismael
Hachim Abdallah, who spent several
months in 1989 detained in those cells.
He is now the president of the
Association of the Victims of Crimes and
Political Repressions in Chad
(“Association des Victimes des Crimes et
Repressions Politiques au Tchad”, AVCRP).
“We would take turns to breathe a little
air from under the door or to stretch
ourselves. When someone died, it could
easily be several days before a guard
would remove the corpse. We would place
the sick next the cadavers so they’d get
a little freshness.” During the regime,
the mortality rate was frightening. “The
human being is strange”, sighs Ismael
Hachim “before dying, I heard men say
they could see the sky open up before
them”.
Article by Jean-Philippe
Remy. Translation by NL.,
July 7, 2006
