Chadian lawyer Jacqueline Moudeina has ignored death threats, survived an attempted assassination and pioneered human rights advocacy in one of the world's poorest countries.
By Jungwon Kim
Jacqueline Moudeina was still an infant when she first became acquainted with political peril. A few years before Chad gained independence from France in 1960, the colonial government tried to recruit her father into politics. Jacques Moudeina rejected the overtures, preferring instead to continue his medical practice in the southern town of Koumra. A few weeks after his namesake was born, he was mortally poisoned by a potion containing the saliva of a lion, according to the man who eventually confessed to the crime, a cook linked to the government.
More than four decades later, Jacqueline Moudeina has received numerous death threats and survived a 2001 assassination attempt that came harrowingly close to succeeding — unintended consequences of her distinction as one of Chad's most prominent human rights lawyers. Yet, over the desperate pleas of her family, she continues to pursue legal cases against Chad's most murderous political figures. Currently in temporary sanctuary at the Penn State Dickinson School of Law as part of the Scholars at Risk Network, Moudeina has not stopped her work. She has been studying advocacy methods and meeting with potential funders for various human rights initiatives, ever mindful of the work that awaits her when she returns to Chad in April.
In person, Moudeina emanates warm elegance, with a tranquil gaze and the smooth alto of a jazz singer. But the life path she has chosen reveals an iron will, one that refuses to bend to either the strictures of Chadian society or the desires of her close-knit family. Moudeina did not become the second female lawyer in Chad's history by deferring to tradition, nor did she decide to go after reviled ex-dictator Hissene Habré with the blessing of her relatives.
"In Chad, being a woman is difficult," she says. "In every aspect, you are always fighting."
Moudeina's family, however, made sure the young Jacqueline got a good education, and this fact alone steered her toward an exceptional future in a country where 90 percent of the population is illiterate. The majority of Chad's 9 million people — among the poorest in the world — eke a life from the land primarily by subsistence farming and herding. But Moudeina's middle-class family has a more illustrious pedigree: Moudeina is descended from two chiefs and related to Chad's first president under independence. Moudeina's grandmother sent the young Jacqueline to good Catholic schools in Koumra and N'Djamena, the capital — her mother had died mysteriously after a routine doctor's visit when Moudeina was 11.
Moudeina later enrolled at the University of Chad in N'Djamena in 1978 and married radio journalist Doumgor Moussa that December. Within a few months, she says, "Everything came to a halt." Civil war broke out in N'Djamena in February 1979, and ethnic tensions inflamed by opportunistic politicians forced southern Chadians to return to the south. Hissene Habré's rise from warlord to national power began during the Reagan administration, when the CIA began funneling hundreds of millions of dollars in covert aid to him in 1981 because of his willingness to fight Libya, according to the Washington Post.
As the war drew closer to the south, Moudeina and her husband had to flee to the Republic of Congo. He was "being chased by the regime," she says, because he was a vocal critic of then-Prime Minister Habré. She spent 13 years in Brazzaville, eventually earning her law degree at l'Université Marien Ngouabi. Moudeina began working for the Brazzaville branch of the organization of which she is now president, the Chadian Association for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (ATPDH). The Brazzaville office focused on disseminating reports to Congolese and international media about what Moudeina describes as Habré's "reign of terror" as president from 1982 to 1990.
Moudeina returned to Chad five years after the 1990 coup by Habré's former chief of staff, Idriss Déby, who had carried out large-scale ethnic massacres in the south under Habré's orders. Despite Déby's egregious record of war crimes, he instituted his military dictatorship with the announcement, "I haven't brought gold or money. I'm bringing democracy." Moudeina recalls a palpable sense of excitement as had's civil society began to reawaken. She sat for the bar, completed her legal training and joined the main branch of ATPDH in N'Djamena.
At first she took pro bono civil rights cases, advocating for many women who had lost everything after being widowed. "The husband's family would come and take everything back from her," says Moudeina. "They would even take the kids. So I would help them get their children back." It would be several years before Moudeina's work would venture into more dangerous terrain.
President Déby surprised international observers when he organized the 1993 Chadian Truth Commission to investigate war crimes under Habré. The commission concluded that Habré's government was responsible for 40,000 political killings of civilians in a "veritable genocide against the Chadian people." Although the report did not finger Déby, it published the names and photographs of agents in the Directorate of Documentation of Security (DDS), Habré's machine of death that was also responsible for the imprisonment, torture, rape and forced exile of hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Appointing the commission may have been an unexpected move, but Déby's response to the commission's findings was lamentably predictable. He buried the report, since many of those on the infamous list were, by then, high-ranking members of Déby's government; indeed Déby himself was a key player in Habré's reign of terror. Press reports gained little traction within Chad because of the high illiteracy rate, and international attention was fleeting.
Many who survived the political maw of Habré's regime, however, had been quietly gathering evidence against the DDS agents. The survivors gathered documentation of killings and described torture methods that reveal the incomprehensible depravity of DDS agents. In the unbearable Chadian heat, the agents poured water over the men just once a day, leaving them to lick it off their bodies and the floor to stay alive; the corpses of those who died of heat exhaustion were left to decompose among the living in crowded prison cells. The survivors' group, which came to be known as the Chadian Association of Victims of Political Repression and Crime, hid the files of evidence in scattered locations.
After several years, Moudeina's fate became intertwined with the dangerous work of these torture survivors. When British courts began deliberating the extradition of General Augusto Pinochet, human rights groups around the world, among them ATPDH, recognized that they could take prosecutions of certain human rights violations abroad. Moudeina and her colleagues began workingwith the survivors to build a case in Senegalese courts against Habré, who was by then living a life of luxurious exile in Dakar after fleeing Chad with $11 million and a private jet. Moudeina's group also brought charges in Chadian courts against all of the former DDS agents on the list.
In February 2000 Senegalese authorities indicted Habré for torture. For a brief, poignant moment, a measure of justice seemed possible. But the Senegalese court dropped the case in 2001 after deciding it had no jurisdiction in the matter, even though Senegal had ratified the U.N. Convention on Torture.
"This is when all my problems started," says Moudeina dryly. "The torturers are in power. When I came back from Dakar, I received phone threats: 'Abandon this case if you want to live.' I told myself this was just intimidation to get us to stop."
June 11, 2001, was the day Moudeina cheated death. She had helped organize a peaceful women's demonstration at the French Embassy to protest the 2001 Chadian elections, widely criticized as fraudulent, although France and the United States supported Déby's victory. Within a few hours armed military and police units, including the presidential guard, surrounded the women and ordered them to disperse. The commanding officer, who happened to be the former director of the DDS, spotted Moudeina. The police threw a grenade that exploded near her, shattering her leg and embedding shrapnel in her flesh.
International human rights groups — including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch — provided financial and logistical assistance for Moudeina's evacuation to France and medical treatment. In Paris she underwent three rounds of reconstructive surgery and 15 months of bed rest. Nearly four years later, she still experiences chronic pain though she walks without a limp. When asked whether she considered abandoning her dangerous line of work, she seems taken aback. "No, on the contrary. I'll never stop. When they threw the grenade, I could have died. The fact that I didn't die makes me think I have work to do. I want to see the fruits of my labor."
Undeterred by the assassination attempt, Moudeina took the Habré case to Belgium. The country's 1999 "universal jurisdiction" law opened its courts to prosecutions of war crimes, genocide and crimes against humanity no matter where they occurred — thereby inviting a flood of high-profile human rights cases. Although Belgium repealed the controversial law in 2003, under intense U.S. pressure, the case against Habré is going ahead because three of the Chadian victims have Belgian nationality.
While Moudeina has taken no special security precautions in N'Djamena, she firmly believes Amnesty International and other international groups have played a part in keeping her safe. "When I was evacuated, the authorities did not respond directly, but many Amnesty letters went directly to the president," says Moudeina. "The government tries to give the impression that it doesn't care when groups like Amnesty intervene, but they pay very close attention. We really need Amnesty International to help us when a human rights defender is threatened or in danger."
Moudeina won international acclaim as her work began to cross borders. She received the 2002 Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders, given by an international network of human rights organizations including Amnesty International. Yet she remains deeply involved in various domestic human rights issues.
She is currently seeking international funding for a safe house for the children and women of Chad's farming communities. In recent years herders in need of labor have begun kidnapping children aged nine to 13 to raise their cows; in some cases the herders purchase the children from destitute farmers for as little as $10, promising to bring them back after one year. But conditions for these child laborers are horrendous; many die from abuse, starvation or preventable diseases. Those who return to their families are often traumatized and catatonic. The herders carry weapons — supplied by the government, Moudeina believes — and have also raped women farmers with almost complete impunity.
Moudeina and her organization have also challenged the Chad/Cameroon Oil and Pipeline Project, a 650-mile oil extraction and transport project financed by the World Bank and completed in 2003. ATPDH is advocating for a more just national oil policy: of the expected $12 billion in revenues, the agreement currently gives a multinational consortium of oil companies (including ExxonMobil and Chevron) 82 percent, while only 12 percent goes to Chad. Moudeina points out that Chadian people desperately need the kind of sustainable development that oil revenues could finance, as well as compensation for the land loss, environmental damage and related health problems.
"Chemical wastes are burned in the open air," says Moudeina. "Individual and collective compensations are given on an arbitrary basis. Dwellings built and offered as compensation for land taking did not stand harsh weather and rain."
Fighting for the human rights of Chadian people, whether on the international stage or in the dusty reaches of the countryside, is an unending and mostly thankless task. Moudeina says she feels "both hopeful and cynical about the future of Chad."
While her family has thus far escaped harassment, Moudeina says family harmony has been a big personal sacrifice. "I'm causing a lot of unhappiness to my family — they are afraid because of me, they don't have peace because of me."
And yet, she exhibits no ambivalence in her commitment. "I am motivated by the desire to obtain justice in Chad. I want a country where there is rule of law so that victims can have their dignity restored. I feel I can be a voice for people who don't have one." 
