Sy Koumbo Singa Gali

Sy Koumbo Singa Gali (born 1961) is a Chadian human rights activist and journalist. She had to leave for the south of Chad at a young age due to its civil war. In 1982 she joined the Ministry of Information under Chad's new president, Hissène Habré. She subsequently received training in Canada, Paris, Senegal, and the United States. In 1987 she graduated from the l'Ecole de Journalisme in Dakar, and in 1988 she returned to Chad. However, when Idriss Déby took power in Chad she stopped working for the Ministry of Information. She worked for Prime Minister Jean Alingué Bawoyeu from 1991 to 1993, but lost her job when he resigned. She joined the newspaper Contact, but after three years of working for them she left and started her own newspaper, called L'Observateur. Since she published articles that criticized Déby's regime, in 1998 she was arrested for libel and imprisoned for ten days. In 2001 she was elected as representative of a coalition of Chadian non-governmental organizations called Organisation des Acteurs Non Étatiques du Tchad. In 2005 she was arrested on charges of inciting hatred for criticizing Déby, and was sentenced to a year in jail, but after protests from human rights groups she was released after 42 days imprisonment. In 2007 she worked as a journalist for the UN Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.