The remains of former Chadian President Hissène Habré sat
Two days after his death by covid-19, Hissène Habré was buried on Thursday, August 26, 2021, in the early afternoon of Dakar. The former chef d’Étattchadien had lived in Senegal for 31 years, after being overthrown by Idriss Déby. It was here that he was sentenced to life in 2016 for crimes against humanity committed during his reign.
The ceremony was discreet, sober and solemn. After the prayer at 2:00 PM, about 200 people left the Omar Mosque located by the sea on the western Corniche in Dakar.
The coffin of the former Chadian dictator, covered with an Islamic cloth, was then taken out of the ambulance in the courtyard of the mosque during construction during the funeral prayer, our Dakar correspondent explains, Thea Ollivier.
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Hissène Habré’s family was present, relatives and sympathizers from Chad and Senegal, his lawyers and some personalities such as parliamentarians or the former Senegalese Prime Minister Abdoul Mbaye. No current official representative for Senegal, however, no minister came.
The body of the deceased was then taken to the Muslim cemetery in Yoff, a district in Dakar, where former Cameroonian President Ahmadou Ahidjo has also been buried since 1989. New prayers were said before the former Chadian head of state was buried in his beloved life.
As tradition dictates, no woman was present. It was still at the request of one of Hissène Habréque’s wives that he was buried in Senegal, while, perhaps one day, he waited for his rehabilitation in Chad.
At the end, his son Hamid Hissène Habré hailed him in a declaration, recalling his father’s commitment to an Africa “free, dignified, united and proud.” “Our duty is to rehabilitate him and do him justice,” he said.
He spoke of a “loving father” and attacked what he described as “injustice”: his conviction in an African court. “Rest in peace, dear father, you deserve it so much,” he concluded.
►Read again: The reactions in Chad after the death of Hissène Habré
In Chad, if the government had given its approval for the return of his remains, the country would have refused to pay tribute to him officially because of “his condemnation and out of respect for his victims.”
Hissène Habré, who ruled Chad between 1982 and 1990, the day of his fall, is dead of Covid-19 at the age of 79 in Senegal, where he was sentenced to life in prison in 2016 by a special court set up in cooperation with the African Union, for crimes against humanity, rape, executions, slavery and kidnapping. He was arrested in his host country in 2013.
In the eyes of one of the ex-dictator’s lawyers, the Senegalese Ciré Clédor Ly, present at the ceremony, his former client was “the victim of a great deceiver, the greatest legal deceiver (to whom) humanity has never had to face.” history to remember his struggle “against imperialism”.
►Listen also: “Hissène Habré was both dictator and liberator of Chad”
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