While Habre was arrested in 2013, it took 13 years to get from his original indictment by a Senegalese judge to the arrest.
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Habre, who ruled in Chad from 1982 to 1990, is accused of overseeing the deaths of thousands of people while targeting any ethnic groups who threatened his regime.
The former Chadian president will stand trial for crimes against humanity, torture and war crimes.
It is “fundamentally important to establish a clear two-way communication between the special court in Senegal and the Chadian population, in order to ensure that the conduct of the trial breeds a real sense of ownership and justice within Chad itself”, he said.
Judge Gberdao Gustave Kam of Burkina Faso opened proceedings and announced the erstwhile military strongman had no legal representation.
“It’s one thing to complain about having abusive African presidents sent to The Hague”.
Chad has taken steps to prosecute abuses that occurred under Habre’s government, as said by Human Rights Watch.
The ICC was embraced by many African governments when it was set up in 2002, but attitudes towards the largely European-funded court have cooled after it has indicted only Africans, prompting many to label it a Western-controlled, neo-colonial institution.
Many doubted that Mr Habre would even show up, as up to now he had refused to cooperate with the court, but he did appear, albeit briefly, surrounded by a dozen security guards.
The former president, for his part, has condemned the trial as politically motivated.
Chadian lawyer Jacqueline Moudeina told a news conference in Dakar in June the trial would be “a turning point for justice in Africa and will sound an alarm for all the dictators whose crimes will one day catch up with them”. The commission particularly blamed Habre’s political police force, the Directorate of Documentation and Security, saying it used torture methods including whipping, beating, burning and the extraction of fingernails.
“This is the first case anywhere in the world – not just in Africa – where the courts of one country, Senegal, are prosecuting the former leader of another, Chad, for alleged human rights crimes”, Reed Brody, a lawyer at Human Rights Watch (HRW), told AFP.
Around 100 witnesses will testify during hearings expected to last around three months, although 4,000 people have been registered as victims in the case.
The nine million euro ($10 million) trial will be filmed and released offline, according to Fall, while a selection of sessions will be shown by the Senegalese state broadcaster RTS.
If convicted, Habre faces between 30 years and life in jail with hard labour, to be served in Senegal or another African Union country.
“There could have been no impunity in this case”, he said. Survivors say they were tortured with electric shocks, near-asphyxia and a process called “supplice des baguettes” where victims’ heads were squeezed between sticks. “I want to know why”.
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Guengueng was an accountant when he was arrested by Habre’s police, who accused him of working with the opposition. I suffered for what reason?
