For sixteen years I’d dreamed of this moment.
One of the world’s most pitiless dictators, a man who had slaughtered his own people to seize and maintain power, who had burned down entire villages and built clandestine dungeons to inflict medieval torture on his enemies, was at last where he belonged, in the dock of an international criminal tribunal.
I’d never caught more than a glimpse of him in the flesh, this man who had consumed my every waking hour for longer than I cared to remember. But now Hissène Habré, the “butcher of Chad,” was sitting just a few feet away from me in a Senegalese courtroom, his authority gone, the all- consuming fear he once inspired now just a haunting memory.
For the past quarter-century, Habré had enjoyed a comfortable exile just a few miles from where we were sitting, with villas and servants and dazzling views of the Atlantic Ocean. I had made it my mission to separate him from these comforts and ensure that he faced both justice and the accusatory gaze of his victims. I had spent years assembling an international team of investigators and lawyers. I had trained survivors to be campaigners, gathered evidence, chased down witnesses, raised millions of dollars in funding, even helped think up the statutes of the court now hearing his case. Over the years, I had walked on dusty earth
covering the mass graves of hundreds of Habré’s victims. I had stumbled upon rooms where the files of Habré’s secret police had been left strewn ankle deep. Along with a number of Habré’s most committed victims and their lawyers, I had worked across continents to win over presidents and ministers, civic leaders, and editorial writers. And now, thanks to all those years of work, we had Habré exactly where we wanted him.
As press photographers swarmed Habré, I moved from my seat to get a better look. Along with his trademark flowing white boubou, he was dressed in a desert turban that concealed his mouth and the lower half of his nose, as if to tell us that the very air in the courtroom was toxic to him. Habré’s dark eyes, framed by gold-rimmed glasses, caught mine for an instant before darting away. He knew exactly who I was, even if we’d never met. I was his relentless hunter, always popping up on television with his victims to remind the world of what he’d done. Reed Bloody, as one of his wives liked to call me, the man who wouldn’t give up, the man who somehow bounced back each time his lawyers convinced themselves that they’d killed off the case once and for all.
Down the years, Habré and his entourage had sought to paint me as an agent of imperialism and neocolonialism, an unscrupulous moneygrubbing American Jew “armed and sponsored by the anti-Islam lobby,” an enemy, as Habré had handwritten to the tribunal, “who has never hidden his aggressive and outrageous hostility, a specialist in forgery and lies.” But it was not just me he was facing. In a few minutes, the judges of this extraordinary pan-African tribunal would enter in their fine robes of ruby-red silk bordered with white fur and black spots. Behind them stood the full weight not only of their Senegalese government hosts but of the African Union and the broader international community. The victims in the courtroom and the principal lawyers representing them were very far from neocolonialists, as Habré well knew. Although Habré tried to paint them as my “puppets” and “mascots,” they were his fellow Chadians, women and men who had survived torture and rape to demand justice. They had dreamed of this day even more ardently than I had.
One thing we knew coming in was that Habré would not be going down quietly. From his formative years as a guerrilla commander in Chad’s northern desert he had an instinctive understanding of asymmetric warfare, of the importance of seizing every advantage when the odds were stacked against him. Even before the judges swept in to occupy their seats, dozens of his supporters burst into the courtroom chanting slogans, and Habré stood up and shouted right along with them. “À bas l’impérialisme!” they yelled, and he responded. Down with imperialism. It was a rich line coming from a man who owed his ascent to power to the CIA, but the irony was largely lost in the passions of the moment. Police flooded into the courtroom, seeking to prevent the protesters from crowding in too close to Habré or clashing with his victims. Black-clad elite Senegalese guards sought in vain to coax the former dictator back into his seat, but he kept pushing and jostling until at length they grabbed him by the arms and dragged him out. “This is a farce! This is a farce!” he yelled, his right hand brandishing a string of gris-gris beads, used across Africa to ward off evil spirits, as he disappeared from sight, followed quickly by his lawyers.
The trial hadn’t even started and already it was veering wildly off the rails. R
Working on the Habré case for Human Rights Watch, I was keenly aware of the contradictions of being an American lawyer seeking to prosecute an American-backed dictator, and I was not entirely surprised that Habré made this a principal line of attack. I’ve operated in the developing world for most of my life, and I’ve always tried to confound what my friend Makau Mutua calls the “savages, victims, and saviors” construct, in which white activists rescue black victims from black perpetrators. It’s a construct that leaves no room for looking at the responsibility of Western actors and denies the agency of the black victims. For sixteen years, I never talked about Habré’s crimes without emphasizing my own government’s support of Habré under President Ronald Reagan. And I was
painfully familiar with the glaring double standards in international justice that make it possible (but still very difficult!) to bring to book Third World despots but not the leaders of more powerful countries. While I was working on the Habré case, I wrote four reports for Human Rights Watch on abuses that the George W. Bush administration had committed against Muslim detainees in the “global war on terror.” I wrote a book arguing that Bush and other top U.S. officials should be investigated for torture and war crimes. I even joined an effort in Europe—unsuccessful, of course—to pursue such an investigation through the same institutions of international justice I was championing in the Habré case. For some of my African critics this was not enough—they’d ask what I was doing on their continent when I should be investigating the Bush administration’s treatment of detainees at Guantanamo instead. And while this was plainly an argument of convenience and a bit of a cheap shot, it was not an entirely unfair critique of the international system.
The fact was, I was a professional at a major Western human rights organization, with access to funding and the international media, collaborating with disempowered victims from one of the poorest countries in the world. And that meant there was a power imbalance inherent in what we were doing. My African partners and I had to figure out ways to spread ownership of the campaign—especially after the press began to label me a “dictator hunter” and sometimes erased the invaluable work of everyone around me. Chad was their country, their history, their future; as an outside actor I needed to tread with humility and avoid reproducing a postcolonial hierarchy that could only undermine the goals we had set for ourselves. In the process, we learned that by focusing on the stories of the victims and giving them a leading role in the campaign, we could capture public imagination and support in a way that a “dictator hunter” narrative could never do.
I certainly made my share of mistakes along the way. Mostly, as I shuffled between my different roles as strategist, fund raiser, press agent, counsel, and producer of the prosecution effort, I grappled with my tendency to want to control everything. As a former tournament chess player, I often imagined that I was sitting across a board from
Habré, locked in a battle of wits that only one of us could win. The long game was in my bones, and it required discipline, patience, and—yes—a degree of control that others sometimes chafed against. The French lawyer Olivier Bercault, whom I hired to work directly with Habré’s victims in Chad, observed early on that I would often think of my allies—the victims, their lawyers, fellow activists—like chess pieces to be moved strategically as I saw fit. But of course, my partners were freethinking individuals deeply invested in the case in their own right, not objects of my will, and “checkmating” Habré was not our only goal. Our campaign needed to be exemplary. We needed to make sure that any trial was both fair and seen to be fair. We needed the victims to receive the recognition and compensation they deserved. We weren’t about to cut deals or make dirty compromises with the abusive Chadian government that had replaced Habré— or with anyone else—just to come away with something we could call a win. R
For me the Habré case was the culmination of an activist life whose roots went all the way back to childhood. My mother was an urban public school arts teacher who inspired students from the toughest of backgrounds to win prizes year after year. She crossed picket lines, risking the ire of her fellow teachers, to support the black community’s control of her school, and she took me to civil rights demonstrations and peace marches. She also wallpapered my childhood room with maps, instilling me with a lifelong love of cartography and a curiosity for foreign places. My Hungarian Jewish father survived forced labor in German camps during World War II, eventually escaping to join the Soviet Red Army and participate in the liberation of Budapest before emigrating, penniless, to the United States, where he became a beloved university literature professor. When I was twelve, my little brother and I declared “independence” from parental tyranny and wrote a constitution for our new country, which we called “Brodania,” based on equal rights and a ban on trade with any country “governed by a dictator or a king.” At fifteen, I went door to door in our poor Brooklyn neighborhood to
support progressive political candidates. I was a college leader in the anti–Vietnam War movement.
As a young lawyer in 1984, I took a trip to Nicaragua to see the Sandinista revolution up close. There, in a mountain village near the Honduran border where I knew the American priest, Catholic lay workers told me stories of schools and farmhouses being burned and of teachers and nurses being killed by the “Contras,” counterrevolutionaries organized by the United States, my country. Never before had I felt such a great responsibility to do something. I quit my job at the New York State attorney general’s office and went back to Nicaragua, where I spent five months traveling the war zones and asking people for their stories. I met widows whose husbands had been killed before their eyes, women who had been raped, people whose houses had been burned down. Just as I returned to the United States, President Reagan described the Contras as the “moral equivalent of our founding fathers” and asked Congress to increase military aid to help them. My report detailing their atrocities landed on the front page of the New York Times and earned me a personal rebuke from the president, who called me a “sympathizer . . . shepherded through Nicaragua by Sandinista operatives.” Still, the report had the desired effect, concentrating enough minds in a divided Congress to deny Reagan the funding he sought.
At age thirty-one, I had helped defeat a U.S. president’s foreign policy, and the experience filled me with a lifelong confidence that if I worked hard enough, I could make a difference anywhere in the world. That confidence was tested many times over the years as I tried, and mostly failed, to uncover atrocities or prosecute the perpetrators in places like Haiti, El Salvador, East Timor, Tibet, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. My father once compared me to the plague-fighting Dr. Bernard Rieux of his hero Albert Camus. I often felt more like Camus’s Sisyphus, however, eternally pushing the rock up the hill only to have it roll back down—but happy with “the struggle itself toward the heights.” My long pursuit of Hissène Habré would test me more strenuously still.
Over and over, during my first thirteen years working with the victims on the Habré case, when every step forward seemed to be followed
by two steps back, I was told I had to be either naive or crazy. Other African despots would never let Habré stand trial, people said; the dictator’s erstwhile backers in the United States and France would never stand for it either. The roadblocks we faced kept multiplying, but still we refused to give up.
One of my main motivations for writing this book is to show not only that we weren’t crazy but that there is nothing inevitable about brutal tyrants going unpunished for their crimes—even now, even in an era of impunity, where autocracy is on the rise and where the very concept of international justice has been questioned, if not actively battered, by world leaders made nervous by the thought of it. Certainly, these alarming developments have augmented the degree of difficulty of what, under even the best of circumstances, is an enormously difficult task. Yet our experience shows that with enough persistence, cunning, and imagination, and above all by putting the victims at the heart of the action, survivors and their supporters can sometimes succeed in bringing the worst criminals among us to justice.