Photo courtesy the Ronald Reagan Library

Hissène Habré had attracted the attention of human rights advocates worldwide almost as soon as he took power in 1982, with Amnesty International publishing its first report on political killings in Chad within a year of his ascent to the presidency. But for decades he was, in essence, untouchable. As Chad’s president, he had the support of the most powerful country in the world, and, while in exile, he was protected by the longstanding international tradition of lifetime immunity for former heads of state. Immunity inherently contradicted -- but had all too often won out over -- the United Nations Convention against Torture, which obligates signatory states to prosecute accused torturers or extradite them to countries that would.

But, in October 1998, the ground suddenly shifted. Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the then-82-year-old former Chilean dictator, was recovering from back surgery in a London hospital when British agents, acting on a Spanish warrant issued at the behest of Spanish citizens harmed by Pinochet, arrested the general and indicted him on 94 counts of torture and one count of conspiracy to commit torture.1

The indictment represented a fraction of the abuses attributed to Pinochet, but it was enough to send cheers through the human rights community and shockwaves through conservative diplomatic circles. “Henceforth, all former heads of government are potentially at risk,” railed former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, decrying the assault on diplomatic immunity -- in this case, of a leader she considered a friend. “This is the Pandora’s box which has been opened -- and unless Senator Pinochet returns safely to Chile, there will be no hope of closing it.”

That’s just what Reed Brody was thinking.

A Brooklyn native and former New York assistant attorney general, Brody was then the advocacy director at Human Rights Watch in Manhattan. He’s a lawyer who relishes the adversarial nature of the profession, and, as he watched the Pinochet news break on CNN, his brain started churning, seized with the possibilities. “We had been in Rome just a couple of months earlier drafting the statute of the International Criminal Court” -- the first permanent criminal court with the authority to prosecute genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes -- “and here was a real case,” Brody said.

The Pinochet arrest marked the first time European judges had applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, which enables courts to try a person accused of the most serious violations of international law, regardless of the defendant’s nationality or where the crime was committed. In the case of Pinochet, the overriding judicial question, to be decided in the House of Lords -- at the time, the highest legal body in the land -- was whether Britain’s obligations under the U.N. Convention against Torture compelled his extradition to Spain, overriding the customary legal immunity.

Brody, who had investigated Pinochet-era human rights abuses in Central America, flew to London to advise the prosecution on behalf of Human Rights Watch. And, in November 1998, in a dramatic verdict read to a packed courtroom, the judges ruled against the Chilean strongman. As one British jurist explained, in what would become the defining sentiment of the judgment: “[T]orture and hostage-taking are not acceptable conduct on the part of anyone. This applies as much to heads of state, or even more so, as it does to everyone else; the contrary conclusion would make a mockery of international law.”

Pandora’s box had been opened, and a tantalizing question buzzed through the human rights community: “Who’s next?”2

As a law student at Columbia, Brody had been highly influenced by one professor’s dissection of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s strategy for upending racial segregation. “They went for the easiest cases first, one by one, leading up to Brown v. Board of Education,” Brody told me over Korean food near the Human Rights Watch offices in the Empire State Building. Home in New York after the Pinochet verdict, he decided to take the same measured approach. Brody wanted a case he could win.

The suggestion that grabbed him came from his friend and former colleague, Peter Rosenblum, then the associate director of Harvard Law School’s human rights program. He left a message from a hotel room in N’Djamena: “I’ve got your next case,” he said. “Habré. Chad.” Brody saw the possibilities right away. Though he knew little about Hissène Habré or Chad, he knew that Senegal, Habré’s supposed safe haven, made the ex-dictator vulnerable.

Senegal had been the first country to ratify the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court and had signed the U.N. Convention against Torture. If Brody could bring a torture case against Habré, Senegal would be compelled to try or extradite him. “It’s a country that’s always considered itself to be in the avant-garde of international law and human rights,” Brody said. “We figured if any country was going to be a candidate to take on an international justice case, Senegal would be that country.”

In 1999, Rosenblum introduced Brody to an intense young Chadian lawyer studying at Columbia. Delphine Djiraibe was one of Chad’s first female attorneys. She warned Brody that, even nine years after Habré’s downfall, the capital was still crawling with the dictator’s henchmen -- they staffed the airport, the customs office, the police force. If Brody were to proceed -- and she was over the moon at the prospect -- he would have to be extremely careful. Witnesses would be afraid to talk. A misstep would put Chadian intelligence on alert. After all, the president, Idriss Déby, had been Habré’s confidant before turning against him.

An avid chess player, Brody decided to push his pawns out first. Two fellows at Harvard’s human rights program, both young lawyers who had studied under Rosenblum, agreed to travel to Chad, ostensibly to research a controversial Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline project. Nicolas Seutin, from Belgium, and his Spanish colleague, Genoveva Hernandez Uriz, arrived in N’Djamena in monsoon season with a $4,000 stipend from Harvard, a few contacts from Djiraibe, and an agreement between themselves that they would pursue their work on the case in secret.

Djiraibe had arranged for them to stay inconspicuously in N’Djamena’s Catholic mission -- Seutin with the priests and Hernandez across the road with the nuns. They had no car, so they walked through the capital’s unpaved, muddy streets looking for witnesses’ homes. “We had a sense that we were being followed,” Hernandez told me, and she and Seutin found that people were palpably afraid to talk about the Habré days.

Souleymane Guengueng, tortured at the hands of the Habré regime, has been instrumental in bringing the dictator to justice. Photo courtesy of Reed Brody

Souleymane Guengueng, in contrast, answered their knock at his door not with the trepidation they’d seen in the few other victims they’d managed to meet, but with an enveloping smile. “He was very emotional, saying he’d been waiting for this moment for so long,” Hernandez recalled. “He said it was the hand of God that sent us.” So the two students sat with him in his garden and listened to the story he’d been burning for so long to tell.

Aug. 3, 1988, had been a slow day at the Lake Chad Basin Commission, the intergovernmental organization where Guengueng worked as an accountant. He looked up from his desk with alarm: His wife, Ruda, rarely came to his workplace, but there she was, crying and scared, pregnant with their seventh child. Plainclothes agents from Habré’s dreaded intelligence service, the Documentation and Security Directorate (DDS), had come to the house looking for him. She begged him to hide.

He barely had time to reassure her when the agents arrived at his office, rolling up in a trademark DDS Toyota. They ordered Guengueng to get his motorbike; he would be made to drive himself to his own arrest, one of the agents sitting behind him. As they set off, Guengueng saw his cousin in the DDS car, also under arrest.

Guengueng was taken to the office of the DDS’s deputy chief of intelligence. “The first question was what religion I believed in,” he recalled. “I said I am Christian. He said he, too -- he’s a Christian. He told me to tell him the truth -- only the truth. If not, he had many ways of obliging me.”

The DDS officer asked him if he knew why he was there. When Guengueng said no, he got a slap. He was then accused of collaborating with his cousin to provide money and shelter to anti-Habré figures during a period when Guengueng had lived across the border in Cameroon. (The entire Lake Chad Basin Commission staff had been temporarily relocated there during a particularly violent period in Chad.) Guengueng had regularly welcomed other Chadian refugees into his Cameroon home, but the charge that he had been an opposition agent sheltering subversives struck him as so ridiculous he laughed.

A soldier standing guard suddenly slammed him in the head with the butt of his rifle.

Guengueng was dragged to a cell, disappearing into a horrific purgatory.

Guengueng was dragged to a cell, disappearing into a horrific purgatory. Over two and half years, the gentle bookkeeper would be held in three different jails -- first in solitary confinement, then packed so tightly with other prisoners he couldn’t lie down to sleep, unless someone died. Which they did, every night, at which point the living would sleep on top of the dead. When the guards deemed the body count high enough to justify the effort -- five or six -- they would remove the corpses. In a long, moving interview in N’Djamena recently, Clément Abaifouta, Guengueng’s friend and fellow former inmate, described being forced daily over four years to bury hundreds of prisoners claimed by execution or illness.

Guengueng was nearly among them. “Three times I lost my will to live,” he told me. “I was very seriously sick.” Guengueng’s ailments were common among political prisoners: malaria, dengue fever, and hepatitis. He was held alternately in total darkness and in unrelenting electric light, 24 hours a day for months on end. For several months, he lost the ability to walk. The worst, however, came after he was caught leading prayers for the prisoners: Guards hung him by his testicles.

“I was thinking, ‘What can I do if God spares me?’” Guengueng told me. That night, he made a silent pact: If he survived, he would dedicate his life to telling the truth about what Hissène Habré had done to Chad. Recounting his story years later, Guengueng had Brody’s emissaries, the young Harvard law students, nearly in tears.

“And then he just says it,” Seutin recalled. “He’d been taking testimonies.”

Hidden in the back of Guengueng’s house were 792 witness accounts that he’d gently coaxed out of fellow prison survivors in the years immediately after Habré was overthrown. They cover three campaigns of ethnically targeted repression during which, suspicious of disloyalty, Habré had allegedly ordered collective punishment of entire tribes -- a cornerstone of his always brutal, ever-evolving consolidation of power. The witness testimonies describe an array of tortures, including waterboarding, forced asphyxiation on the tailpipe of a car, and the infamous “Arbatachar” method -- in which all four limbs are bound behind the victim’s back, the cord yanked tight until the chest is thrust forward, hyperextended as far as possible, leaving some deformed, paralyzed, or without the use of limbs.

Former Habré regime members who had remained in N’Djamena after the dictator fled, many still in positions of power, had eventually gotten wind of Guengueng’s efforts, however, and threatened his life. So Guengueng had hidden the documents, hoping for a better day, he told the lawyers. With their arrival, he said, that day had now come.

“In that moment, we knew there was a case here. We were very excited,” Hernandez recalled. “We thought we had hard evidence now and that this could be the seed for judicial action.”

She and Seutin were also scared. They bought paper for Guengueng, and he surreptitiously copied the files at his office. Seutin hid them in the laundry room of the monastery, but he and Hernandez had no idea how to get them out of Chad. Carrying them out through the airport in their luggage was discussed and discounted as too dangerous. They met with a political officer at the U.S. Embassy who offered to move the files via diplomatic pouch, but something about the offer felt shady, and they walked away.

Hernandez had to leave Chad before they’d found a solution. A few nights later, Seutin made an impulsive decision: Despite the risks, he took one of the senior priests into his confidence, packed the documents in his bags, and asked for a ride to the airport. He began to regret his rashness from the moment he stepped up to the Air Afrique desk to change his ticket, issued for several days later, to that night’s flight. The desk agent inspecting his ticket, suddenly suspicious, suggested (erroneously) that the original was a forgery. Fighting panic as he argued with the agent, Seutin glanced over at security; customs officials were randomly opening suitcases and rummaging through them.

Then, the weird altercation with the Air Afrique agent subsided as inexplicably as it had begun. Seutin got in line with his document-crammed bag. The officials continued to select luggage for inspection. He got to the front of the line and … just got lucky. “By the next morning, I was in Paris, and the documents were out of the country.”