It seems that a relentless treadmill of events forces me to write, in this blog, about nothing but dictators, famines, and wars. For those of you who are tired of it, let me confess that I am, too. I wanted to devote a new entry to one of my real passions ― landscape, music, reading, nature, erotic pleasure, the exquisite freedom of the road. But an article forwarded to me unleashed a flood of memory and opened up private boxes that I’ve generally kept shut. And it was about a dictator. Now, I write a lot about dictators, and the observant among you will notice that I don’t much like them. But, in most cases, this is the result of studying history. Dictators are people I’ve mostly encountered in books. But there is one exception. There is a dictator with whom my relationship is more concrete, and has nothing to do with books. He is one of the “small-fry”. His crimes are monstrous, but his numerous victims were people the world cared nothing about. The slaugther and horror took place right next door to the current slaughter in Darfur, and was on the same scale, but in those pre-internet days it might as well have taken place in another solar system. The man I’m talking about is Hissène Habré.
A mounted Dazaga (Gourane).… not quite a match for the more remote (and seldom photographed) Teda.
I’m going to write this item now, in one slug, without reference material, so it will depend entirely on my personal memory of events a quarter century ago, so bear with me. I may get some details wrong. If so, I will correct them when the casting cools.
The Jeune Afrique news item reveals that Habré may actually face a court of law. L’Assemblée nationale du Sénégal a modifié mardi la Constitution, en introduisant de manière “exceptionnelle” une rétroactivité pour des infractions comme les crimes contre l’humanité pour lesquels est poursuivi l’ex-chef d’Etat tchadien, Hissène Habré, au pouvoir entre 1982–90. it reads. Senegal has changed it’s constitution so that a foreign head of state can be tried for human rights violations. Habré may possibly come to trial for his crimes. But don’t count on it. The struggle to bring him to justice, initiated by human rights activists in Belgian courts, has been consistently resisted by both the Senegalese government, and the African Union. Belgium has been seeking his extradition, but Senegal has refused it. The African Union, an organization dominated by dictators, does not approve of the idea of dictators being tried.and it has done everything in its power to discourage the extradition. Instead, they have insisted on a trial in Senegal. So the “trial” may prove to be a potemkin village. On the other hand, Habré may be sacrificed in the interest of heading off the extradition precedent, at least to the extent of being found officially guilty.
For eighteen years, now, Habré, ousted by a coup, has lived in comfortable exile in Dakar, the clean West African city with pleasant boulevards, where one can stroll on Plage Bel-Air or the Anse-Bernard, shop for high-fashion boubous at Islam Couture, and where the aroma of roasted peanuts and freshly baked baguettes permeates the air. Now there is a different dictator in faraway, mind-bogglingly poor Chad, cut from the same cloth, but not as extreme. Few people outside of Africa know of Habré’s crimes, and even fewer care. He is one of those bloodthirsty monsters who was created, installed, encouraged, pampered, and financed by American Conservatives, and committed sickening atrocities. He murdered tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children, and practiced torture on a massive scale.
But my memories date from the period when he was not yet in power, still essentially a tribal chieftain in one of the remotest, most inhospitable parts of the world, one of many characters in a war that lasted from 1978 to 1987. At the time, I had no idea that he was on Ronald Reagan’s payroll, and that the children being burnt alive, or sold into slavery, the women and old people shot or hacked to death, could thank the American tax-payer for their experience. Nor did I know that Reagan’s CIA henchmen were paying and training what would become the DDS, Habré’s secret police, assassination and torture squads. Some estimates put the number of torture victims as high as 200,000 — making Saddam Hussein look like a dilettante, by comparison.
But this stuff was just starting to roll, when I started poking around. All I knew was that Habré was a Daza of the Anakaze clan, and was leading an army of Daza and Teda warriors against the current dictator of Chad, Goukouni Oueddei, who was a Teda of the Tomagra clan, and the grandson of the Derde of Bardai, in the high Tibesti. The Derde was associated with the Senussi school of IsIam, which Islamized the Teda in the 19th century. I knew that Habré had studied political science in Paris, spouted the usual moronic Marxist claptrap, and had formed part of Oueddei’s government, until he retreated to his desert fastness. I also knew that he had, a few years earlier, kidnapped a French archaeologist named Françoise Claustre, her assistant, and a German doctor, whose names I can’t remember, hidden them in the remote Tibesti, and demanded a ransom. He executed a French army officer sent to negotiate for the captives. Her husband attempted to negotiate, but he, too was captured. France paid a hefty ransom, but Habré kept it, without releasing the hostages. Later, he released them as part of another deal. I also knew that most of the sedentary people on the edge of the Sahara feared him, and that his forces were somehow connected to the slave trade. More recently, Libyan forces, heavily armed with modern weapons, had invaded Chad and annexed much of the empty Saharan part of the country, at least the parts you could get to in a tank. But in the remote and rugged Tibesti, they controlled nothing except the fortified position at Bardai. Habré’s desert warriors drove this army out of Bardai and now, from the mountains, indirectly controlled much of the northern half of the country. Oueddei remained in control of the Capital, and the populated south. That was just starting to change.
The Teda are the northern division of the Toubou people, the southern division usually being called Dazaga or Gourane. A Teda desert warrior is one of the most frightening things you can ever see, and you can easily understand their superiority in combat over even the most well-armed modern armies. Even the Tuareg, the famous warriors of the Sahara to the west of them, who kept the French army at bay for a hundred years, do not care to tangle with them. Like the Tuareg, the men are veiled, and traditionally never show their faces. Habré, however, did show his face, puffy and bearded then, though he now appears slimmer and the beard is now greying. Like most dictators, he changes looks to suit the audience (he now affects the air of a simple, pious Muslim). Many of his soldiers, a rabble of hooligans of varied origins, were dressed in French-style combat uniforms, or fractions thereof. But the ones who really counted were the old-style mounted Teda warriors, because it was they who could fight in the Tibesti, an environment in which everything is extreme, and everything is dangerous. The Teda have inhabited this land for no one knows how many thousands of years. They may have been the Garamantes who defeated Roman legions. Their customs show more influence from Ancient Egypt than from their nominal Islam.
For, at the time I speak of, Tibesti was one of the remotest and most difficult places to reach on Earth, and though it can be more easily reached now, it remains one of the harshest landscapes on the planet. Afghanistan, by comparison, is Central Park. The Tibesti massif is a complex of seven giant volcanoes, each reaching ten or eleven thousand feet in height (3,000–3,500 m), gigantic lava flows, and two immense meteor impact craters. The landscape is like giant pieces of jagged, broken glass scattered in a maze of tangled ridges, pillars, craters, stinking natron pits, and the occasional lake of boiling mud. Hidden in a labyrinthine maze of geological formations, most of which can’t be crossed by any vehicle or animal, are a handful of oases, and wadis with a little vegetation and moisture. This lost world of strange, almost Martian landscapes covers an area about 300 km (or 200 miles) from east to west, and a little less from north to south.
0 Comments.