Global Policy Forum

By Anne Penketh

Souleymane Guengueng was a lowly government employee when he was picked up by Chad's political police in August 1988 and imprisoned for a crime he did not commit. Wrongfully accused of working for the opposition fighting to overthrow President Hissene Habre, he was released two and a half years later when the dictator fled into exile. His family had given up hope of seeing him again. Now the tables have turned, and soon Hissene Habre - darling of the Americans and the French during his bloody eight-year rule - will be facing charges of crimes against humanity and torture. Mr Guengueng and his group, representing 792 victims of the Habre-era atrocities and their surviving relatives, are the accusers.

A Belgian investigating magistrate is expected to formally indict the former Chadian leader in a landmark case which will show African dictators they should no longer assume they can commit human rights abuses with impunity. It has been an emotional journey for Mr Guengueng, supported by Human Rights Watch, in his long quest for justice against the man known as the "African Pinochet". After a Chadian Truth Commission accused Habre's regime of 40,000 political murders and systematic torture, the exiled president was placed under house arrest in Senegal three years ago. For a time it looked as though he would be judged there. Mr Guengueng, armed with documents he kept hidden under his house, testified in secret. But the process was halted when the Senegalese courts ruled in 2001 that he could not be tried in the country as his alleged crimes had not been committed there.

Mr Guengueng and Human Rights Watch still had another card to play. During the case in Senegal they had sought Habre's extradition to Belgium under its "universal jurisdiction" law. The legislation meant that perpetrators of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity could be tried no matter where the crime was committed, and regardless of their nationality. Belgium, which had also sought to prosecute the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon for war crimes over his role in the massacres at the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps, repealed its controversial law in July, under US pressure. But because three of the Chadian victims have Belgian nationality, and the investigation by the Belgian magistrate Daniel Fransen had already begun in Chad, Mr Guengueng's case will go ahead.

Mr Guengueng, 52, wears thick glasses after almost losing his eyesight in jail. His ordeal included being subjected to total darkness followed by periods of powerful light. "I did not know if it was night or day. There were eight of us in the cell built for a single person: my skin peeled off in the stifling heat." As in the UN war crimes case against the former Yugoslav leader Slobodan Milosevic, the difficulty for the Belgian prosecution will be to produce the "smoking gun" that proves the direct link between Hissene Habre and the atrocities.

But Mr Guengueng is confident. "It was Habre who set up the political police. He was kept informed of everything," he says, adding that one of the jails for political prisoners was inside the presidential compound. Backing his claim is a treasure trove of documents discovered in May 2001 by Human Rights Watch in the abandoned offices of the Chadian political police. Mr Guengueng's struggle for justice was honoured at a Human Rights Watch ceremony in London. Reed Brody, the organisation's special counsel for prosecutions, said: "Souleymane Guengueng has harnessed his own suffering into a campaign to break the cycle of impunity [in] his country and all of Africa."

Why has Mr Guengueng risked so much campaigning for justice? He lost his job with the Lake Chad Basin Commission in November 2002 after Mr Fransen's visit to the capital, Ndjamena. The victims' association lawyer escaped assassination in a grenade attack apparently ordered by one of the Habre-era security officials who are still in their posts. "I will not feel complete until Habre is in jail," Mr Guengueng says. "I can't have psychological peace. We are doing this to prevent it happening again, for future generations."

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