I was five or six years old when I first understood the price of opposing the government in my country. That night, soldiers from Moundou and N’Djamena had surrounded Beinanmar, my hometown in southern Chad. They were searching for activists from the URD, a party fiercely opposed to the ruling regime. My older brother Jean-Claude was on their list. Alerted in time, he managed to flee to Cameroon. Others were not so lucky: uncles and cousins, taken away and then executed just outside the village. […]