U . S . -backed network called “ Mosaic ”, which linked the security services of the Côte d ’ Ivoire , Israel , Chad , Togo , the Central African Republic , Zaire and Cameroon . Mosaic ’ s apparent purpose was to make sure political opponents of one regime could find no haven in any of the other participating countries . One former DDS deputy director who was spilling secrets to Amnesty International , for example , was kidnapped in Togo in 1988 , and delivered back to Habré , who threw him in jail where he starved to death . The model was strikingly similar to Operation Condor , the Pinochet-era alliance of Latin American intelligence services whose victims included Orlando Letelier , the former Chilean ambassador to Washington , killed in a car bombing in the U . S . capital in 1976 .
The documents also revealed startling cases of heroism , like that of Rose Lokissim , who had been jailed in the mid-1980s for assisting southern rebels . Rose was legendary among survivors of the “ Locaux ” prison where she spent six months as the only woman with 60 men in Cell C , the “ cell of death ”, before being transferred back to the regular cells . She helped two detainees deliver babies in custody and was known for her ability to boost people ’ s morale . Clément Abaifouta , who would become the president of the victims ’ association after Ismael Hachim ’ s death , remembered that in jail Rose would tell people , « Stay strong until we can get out of this prison . Then we ’ ll change the direction of things in this country . She was a revolutionary , because she had ideas that fired us up to revolt , to dream of a change . At that time , we were all afraid .» When prisoners died or were executed , Rose noted the abuses on scraps of paper and smuggled the information out to relatives . Ultimately , she was denounced by a fellow prisoner and killed .
What nobody knew until we found the documents was how bravely Rose had gone to her death . After she was betrayed , the DDS interrogated her on May 15 , 1986 and recorded her telling them : « If I die here , it will be for my country and my family . History will talk of me . I ’ ll be thanked for my service to the Chadian nation .»
The DDS interrogators concluded that Rose was
« irredeemable and continues to undermine state security , even in prison », and recommended that « the authorities punish her severely ». She was executed that same day . This story haunted me like no other , and I marveled at the fact that her words , spoken only to her tormentors , had found their way to me after fifteen years , like a note in a bottle washing ashore . Rose wanted history to talk about her , and now I had the material in my hands to make sure it would do just that .
At Human Rights Watch , a team of seven interns spent six months organizing the DDS files into a searchable database . Patrick Ball , the “ statistician of the human rights movement ”, who had assembled data for truth commissions and courts in Guatemala , Haiti , South Africa and Kosovo , gave us our first analysis of the extent of the Habré regime ’ s crimes . The documents mentioned 12,321 different victims and 1,208 deaths in detention . Habré received 1,265 direct communications about the status of 898 detainees .
We had a few documents bearing what appeared to be Habré ’ s handwriting , including one in which he refused a Red Cross request to hospitalize prisoners taken on the battlefield . But what was the most incriminating thing was the sheer number of crimes committed around Habré , their systematic nature , and the fact that so much information about them was being sent to him directly . Here , in black and white , was overwhelming proof that he knew what was going on and , at the very least , did not put a halt to the crimes . We could , in legal parlance , ascribe “ command responsibility ” to him and use it as a basis for charging and convicting him .
Despite this evidence , and Habré ’ s first indictment in 2000 by a Senegalese judge , however , the Government of Senegal refused for more than a decade to allow the case to advance . For that , it would take one of the world ’ s most patient and tenacious campaigns for justice by a group of survivors , a 2012 ruling obtained by Belgium from the International Court of Justice ordering Senegal to prosecute Habré “ without further delay ”, and the election the same year of a new president ,
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Observing Memories Issue 6