Staying the Course: On Reed Brody’s “To Catch a Dictator”

IN 1982, after several years of civil war, Hissène Habré seized power in Chad, a large, landlocked country in northern Central Africa sandwiched between Niger and Sudan. Riven by internal divisions, Chad has long been one of the poorest countries on earth.

Habré, a 40-year-old former militia leader, educated at elite universities in Paris, attempted to eliminate his opposition by empowering his secret police to imprison, torture, and kill suspected opponents on an industrial scale. A Chadian truth commission later found that during Habré’s eight years in power, some 40,000 people were killed and 200,000 tortured. During this time, Habré enjoyed the support of both France—Chad’s former colonial ruler—and the United States under the Reagan administration, which saw Habré as a useful ally against Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi.

In 1990, though, Habré fell to an insurgency led by members of a competing ethnic group. He fled to Dakar, Senegal, with a reported $12 million looted from the Chadian treasury, which he used to establish a comfortable life for himself and his wives. To ensure his position in Senegal, Habré donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Senegal’s powerful Islamic religious groups. One might have assumed that, unless he returned to Chad to engage in further battles for power, Habré was safe from any kind of justice for the atrocities committed under his command.

In To Catch a Dictator: The Pursuit and Trial of Hissène Habré (2022), Reed Brody gives a detailed account of the long struggle to bring Habré to trial, chronicling the many legal, political, and personal problems that had to be overcome to get there. Brody provides something of a guide for other activists who might want to take on similar cases; at the same time, he implicitly raises questions about the unmet promises of the international justice movement.

Habré miscalculated when he fled to Senegal. For the first time since the 1940s Nuremberg trials, the post–Cold War 1990s saw a surge of Western interest in establishing the means to bring war criminals to justice, especially those who had been heads of state. Chastened by the genocides in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda—and by the failure to stop them as they happened—the United Nations authorized war crime tribunals to prosecute the leaders who oversaw those atrocities. The UN established the International Criminal Court, a “court of last resort” meant to prosecute war criminals when the justice systems of their own countries failed to do so.

Though there were many acknowledged weaknesses in the ICC statute, Mary Robinson, then the UN high commissioner for human rights, wrote that the organization hoped to “create a world in which there [would] be no safe haven for the likes of Idi Amin or Pol Pot.”

The momentum for accountability for war crimes increased when a Spanish judge signed an international arrest warrant for former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet for crimes committed while he was in power. He had been charged under the principle of “universal jurisdiction,” which holds that perpetrators of serious crimes can be charged anywhere in the world if their own countries either cannot or fail to hold them accountable. The case initiated a spate of legal wrangling, and though Pinochet was eventually sent back to Chile on medical grounds, his arrest seemed to herald the possibility of a new era of accountability for leaders who had previously been untouchable.

Human Rights Watch, an NGO based in New York, was a major player in these steps towards building a framework for international justice. Founded in the 1970s, the organization had first made its name through advocacy for Soviet dissidents. In the 1990s, Kenneth Roth, a hard-driving former United States prosecutor, took the reins and further led the organization’s involvement in the burgeoning international justice movement.

Brody joined HRW as the organization’s advocacy director during this shift in 1998. His first assignment for the organization, he writes, was to lobby governments for the establishment of the ICC. The Pinochet arrest lit another fire under HRW, which realized how useful universal jurisdiction might be in bringing former tyrants to justice. In response, the group set out looking for a war criminal to build a case against. They wanted a landmark decision that would have an impact similar to Brown v. Board of Education, according to Brody: “We too needed a case everyone could agree on, a case we could win.”

Habré, a decade into his Senegalese exile, fit the bill. Not only had the atrocities committed during his regime been documented by a truth and reconciliation commission, but he was also in Senegal, which had passed a universal jurisdiction law. Brody and HRW, furthermore, saw the importance of prosecuting such a case on African soil, which would show that the legal principle extended beyond Europe and perhaps help avoid the inevitable accusations of neocolonialism.

Brody’s work on the case began in 2000 when he started to meet with Habré’s Chadian victims. One of the foremost among them was Souleymane Guengueng, a civil servant who had been falsely imprisoned for three years under Habré. Upon his release, Guengueng, who had watched many of his fellow prisoners die, dedicated himself to seeing that Habré faced justice. He founded a victim’s association and compiled hundreds of individual reports from others who had suffered under Habré’s reign. Brody takes pains to credit his Chadian partners, and stories such as Guengueng’s give the book its emotional center.

At the same time, Brody put together a team of African human rights lawyers to work on the case. In January 2000, they filed a complaint against Habré in Dakar. A Senegalese judge accepted the case and allowed Habré to be formally charged with torture and other crimes. Though a moment of celebration for Brody and his colleagues, it was only the start of a process that would take 15 more years to see Habré in the dock.

Brody scrupulously details the challenges the team encountered in seeing Habré face justice. The case ran aground after the election of a new president, Abdoulaye Wade, who wished to make the whole headache disappear. Wade first interfered with the country’s judiciary and then moved to expel Habré, potentially to a country that would not extradite him.

Brody and his legal team lodged another case against Habré in Belgium under its universal jurisdiction laws. US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, incensed by a case filed in Belgium accusing former president George H. W. Bush of war crimes in the first Gulf War, threatened to freeze American funding for Belgium’s NATO headquarters and even remove NATO from Belgium entirely.

Belgium then gutted its universal jurisdiction law, a signifier of the dramatic reversal in progress towards standards of international justice for war crimes in the post-9/11 world. An exception was made, however, to allow the Habré case to continue.

On the ground in Chad, Brody and his team of international lawyers worked with a dedicated group of Chadian victims and lawyers to compile evidence of crimes committed under Habré. Chief among these allies was Jacqueline Moudeïna, a Chadian human rights lawyer who was severely wounded in the legs after being targeted in a grenade attack while leading a protest in Chad in 2001.

Brody, from the first pages of the book, acknowledges the power imbalances between the local and international activists as well as the dangers of appearing to be a white-savior activist working in Africa. These tensions were sharpened after Brody was labeled the “Dictator Hunter” by a 2007 documentary and subsequent media reports. As a result, he writes, the campaign foregrounded Moudeïna as its public face in Africa and also started a steering committee that included activists from both sides to make major decisions.

Dynamics between international human rights lawyers and their local partners are often fraught with differing goals. The first group is usually looking to set a larger precedent, while the second is hyperfocused on the specifics of the case at hand. Brody mentions some of these struggles throughout the book (as does Moudeïna in her introduction) but glosses over the details. One feels he could have expanded more on the tactical and strategic disagreements between the international lawyers and local activists as these are an inevitable part of the structures of justice. Success or failure can ride on navigating them sensitively.

Brody seems most comfortable with detailing the political and advocacy sides of the case, listing a series of visits to a seemingly endless procession of European and African capitals to lobby politicians. This leaves readers with a sense of the immense personal effort that Brody and others put into the pursuit of Habré. Guengueng lived in Brody’s Brooklyn apartment for a spell, and Brody notes in passing that his own “obsession with Habré” led to the breakdown of his marriage. He mentions his fundraising efforts but leaves it to the reader to imagine the persuasive skills needed to extract money from donors who must have felt skeptical about funding a seemingly endless case. Brody estimates that the effort cost $6 million in total.

In the end, a series of agreements were made within the African Union to keep the case in Senegal, but only the election of a more amenable Senegalese president, Macky Sall, cleared the way to an actual trial, which began in 2015.

In the book’s most riveting passages, Brody describes victims’ testimonies in court as they finally confront Habré, who sits impassively, wearing sunglasses and a turban while refusing to acknowledge them. Several women reveal their stories of being raped, including one, Khadija Hassan Zidane, who describes how Habré personally violated her. Given the taboo against sharing such stories in Chad, this was the first time that even Brody had heard these details. She was waiting until the moment she could face her tormenter directly.

Such testimonies, and the reams of documents and other evidence amassed against Habré, led to his conviction for rape, torture, war crimes, and crimes against humanity, earning him a sentence of life in prison. Upon announcement of the verdict, the victims in the courtroom erupted in celebration. Brody writes that that day, May 30, 2016, “was the biggest day in [his] life.” With their victory, Brody and his allies had shown that such cases could be heard in African court systems, at a bargain cost compared to international tribunals.

The story after the victory has been, inevitably, complicated. In its decision, the court awarded compensation to Habré’s victims of up to $33,000, depending on what they had suffered—life-changing money in Chad. Though there were promises of a victims’ trust fund and an effort to identify and seize Habré’s assets, nothing has happened. Brody writes that many of the victims have become embittered and now protest every week in N’Djaména, Chad’s capital.

Habré himself died on August 24, 2021. At his family’s request, he had been released to a private medical clinic, where he contracted a lethal case of COVID-19. Brody notes that the United States has never had any reckoning over its support of Habré’s murderous regime.

Brody has moved on to a similar case with another group of victims—those who suffered under the regime of Yahya Jammeh, former strongman of the Gambia who is now in exile in Equatorial Guinea. Once again, Brody and his allies are building a case from the ground up and lobbying Teodoro Obiang, the iron-fisted president of Equatorial Guinea, to extradite Jammeh for trial.

When Brody started at HRW 25 years ago, the promise of international justice was that the prosecution of such cases might institutionalize an international system. As Brody writes, though, the ICC has so far spent nearly $2 billion to secure only a handful of convictions, none of them of heads of state. The court has been accused of being slow, costly, inefficient, and limited in power.

The Habré case shows the importance of centering victims’ stories as a way to build moral pressure. “If there was one secret to our success,” he writes, “one thing that kept our campaign alive when all else seemed to fail us, it was that we understood the need to put the victims, those directly affected, at the heart of the action and the narrative.”

The ICC’s failure to focus on victims, he writes, is in part responsible for its lack of impact.

Activists have continued to use universal jurisdiction laws. For example, in November 2021, an Argentinian court agreed to hear a case brought by a group of Rohingya activists accusing the military leadership of Myanmar of genocide.

If there is one conclusion to be taken from Brody’s book, though, it is that achieving justice in cases such as these is an exhausting effort that requires diligence verging on obsession, political agility, and large doses of luck. Habré had the misfortune of running into an unflagging set of adversaries under the wrong circumstances. Unfortunately, most of the world’s remaining tyrants will not be so unlucky.

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Doug Merlino is the author of several nonfiction books and the co-writer of Speaking Freely: My Life in Publishing and Human Rights (2016), the memoirs of Human Rights Watch founder Robert Bernstein.