(CPJ/IFEX) – The following is a CPJ news alert: CPJ PUBLISHES “HUNTING THE DICTATOR” CPJ is pleased to announce the Web publication of “Hunting the Dictator,” Chadian journalist Daniel Bekoutou’s account of how his life was threatened after he led the fight to have former Chadian leader Hissene Habré prosecuted for torture and other crimes […]
(CPJ/IFEX) – The following is a CPJ news alert:
CPJ PUBLISHES “HUNTING THE DICTATOR”
CPJ is pleased to announce the Web publication of “Hunting the Dictator,” Chadian journalist Daniel Bekoutou’s account of how his life was threatened after he led the fight to have former Chadian leader Hissene Habré prosecuted for torture and other crimes perpetrated between 1982 and 1990.
On February 3, 2000, a Senegalese court indicted the “African Pinochet.” This was the first time in African history that African victims had asked a court in another African country to prosecute a former African head of state. Much of the evidence was gathered by Bekoutou, a reporter with the Dakar daily Walfadjri who also worked for one of the Senegalese human-rights organizations that filed the complaint against Habré.
On the day after Habré’s indictment, Bekoutou began receiving death threats. “You must assume the consequences of your involvement in the Habré case,” read the first sentence of an anonymous letter he received at home. Fearing for his life, Bekoutou fled to Paris, where he plans to stay until tensions have cooled down in Dakar. This is his story.
EXCERPT:
“And what was my alleged “crime”? Maybe it was an article that I published in the January 26, 2000, edition of Walfadjri, containing inconvenient revelations about the disappearance of two Senegalese citizens in Habré’s prisons. The Senegalese authorities had apparently never been informed of this event, and Habré and his cohorts objected to a Chadian journalist writing about it in the Senegalese press, lest he damage their relations with a generous government that had granted them political asylum. That would explain why they saw me not as a journalist but as a traitorous Chadian who had intentionally set out to damage their reputations at a time when their legal position was already precarious.”
You can read the complete text of the article at www.cpj.org.
