2 . Reed Brody stumbled upon thousands of files of Habré ’ s political police , the feared “ DDS ,” at its N ’ Djamena headquarters in 2001 . Photo courtesy of Pierre Hazan
the cobwebs . The first thing I scooped up was a file on a DDS detainee , the next a report on rebel activity . Olivier and I kept digging . We found lists of DDS prisoners , death certificates , interrogation and spying reports , identity cards . Once we ’ d waded through the first room , we found two more filled with the same discarded papers . By all appearances , these DDS files had been languishing here , unnoticed , for the past eleven years .
This was , as we recognized immediately , the mother lode . El Dorado . Nothing could be more valuable in the case we were mounting against Habré than the cold , bureaucratic records of his own underlings . Pierre ’ s camera captured the moments of our discovery on film . Our escort from Déby ’ s office said – also on camera – that the documents were ours if we wanted them . I could hardly believe what he was saying . But after saying it once , he said it again . In my mind , I had been plotting how to stuff some of the juicier documents into my pockets , but now , apparently , I didn ’ t have to .
Taking official possession of the documents was still not easy . Nothing in Chad ever was . It took months of negotiations before Hachim and his victims ’ association were allowed to come on site and copy – not take – the documents . And it took months more for a team of volunteer victims to go through the offices room by room , sort the documents , and put through them through a manual copier that they brought on site each day . The leader of this recovery team was Sabadet Totodet , a former DDS detainee whose prison tasks included dumping the bodies of fellow inmates in a mass grave on the outskirts of N ’ Djamena . In an important sense , he was resurrecting the people he had previously been assigned to bury .
Sabadet and his fellow volunteers began work at dawn each day and worked until the heat became unbearable in the early afternoon . Once they had amassed their copies , the victims ’ association made another copy and sent it all along to my office at Human Rights Watch in New York .
The picture that the documents painted of the DDS and its inner workings was chilling . But it was also exactly what we ’ d been looking for . Among prosecutors , documents are
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Observing Memories Issue 6