Chad’s ‘torture factories’ under spotlight at Cannes film festival

There is a heart-stopping moment in a new documentary about the survivors of Chadian dictator Hissène Habré’s torture chambers, when one of the torturers kneels down in front of his victim and begs for forgiveness.

“I had to follow orders,” mumbles the man, now living on the streets as an outcast. “Then why did you have to beat me so badly?” his victim asks, handing the former gendarme the rubber pipe he used to flail his prisoner’s leg to a pulp. “Your superiors told you to stop, but you went on and on,” adds the victim, who lost a leg as a result of the beating.

The scene is typical of the muted but unflinching encounters that fill Hissein Habre, A Chadian Tragedy, Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s film about one of Africa’s least-known mass killings, which premieres at the Cannes film festival on Monday.

Some 40,000 people were murdered during Habré’s eight-year reign of terror between 1982 and 1990, while the west looked the other way, more worried about the cold war and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya.