Hissène Habré ruled Chad from 1982 to 1990. His one-party government relied on the DDS, a political police force that ran prisons where detainees were systematically tortured and many died; Human Rights Watch documents waves of repression against people in the south in 1984, the Hadjerai in 1987 and the Zaghawa in 1989-90, as well as Chadian Arabs. A Commission of Inquiry created by his successor, Idriss Déby, in December 1990 reported in 1992 that Habré's government was responsible for more than 40,000 deaths and singled out the DDS. After a campaign by victims and Human Rights Watch, the Extraordinary African Chambers, set up by Senegal and the African Union, convicted Habré on 30 May 2016 of crimes against humanity, war crimes and torture, including sexual violence, and sentenced him to life imprisonment; on appeal in April 2017 the life sentence was upheld though his personal conviction for rape was overturned. A Chadian court had convicted 20 former security agents in March 2015. Habré died in August 2021, and Human Rights Watch reported in 2022 that victims had received no reparations.
Hissène Habré's government in Chad, through its political police, the Directorate of Documentation and Security (DDS), detained, tortured and killed suspected opponents and carried out campaigns against the Hadjerai, Zaghawa and Chadian Arab communities and the south
The low end is the number of people named in the DDS's own files, recovered and analysed by Human Rights Watch, as killed or having died in detention; it is a documented minimum from the records of one agency. The high end is the 1992 Chadian Commission of Inquiry's estimate of more than 40,000 deaths during Habré's rule, which human rights groups continue to cite; the Extraordinary African Chambers did not adopt a total. The commission's figure rests on testimony from 1,726 witnesses and extrapolation, and may include deaths in Habré's wars and rural campaigns as well as in custody.
The 1992 Chadian Commission of Inquiry documented mass deaths, executions, systematic torture and arbitrary detention by the DDS; Human Rights Watch and the Extraordinary African Chambers' 2016 judgment documented sexual violence, including the sexual enslavement of women held in a desert camp.
Chad