Nigeria's army behind countless acts of torture and 8,000 deaths, Amnesty says
- By: David Smith | The Guardian
- Jun 3, 2015
- 5 min read
Nigeria's army behind countless acts of torture and 8,000 deaths, Amnesty says
Nigeria’s president, Muhammadu Buhari before a meeting with service chiefs in Abuja on Tuesday. Photograph: Bayo Omoboriowo/AP
Senior military officers in Nigeria should be investigated for war crimes including the starvation, suffocation and torturing to death of 8,000 people, Amnesty International has said.
An investigation carried out over several years, perhaps the most damning account yet of the military response to Boko Haram, casts a shadow over the first foreign trip of the new Nigerian president, Muhammadu Buhari, during which he is set to discuss a fresh regional strategy against the Islamist group.
Amnesty set out on Wednesday the case against five senior Nigerian officers in a 133-page report based on hundreds of interviews, including with military sources, and leaked defence ministry documents.
During security operations against Boko Haram in the north-east, it says the armed forces “committed countless acts of torture; hundreds, if not thousands, of Nigerians have become victims of enforced disappearance; and at least 7,000 people have died in military detention as a result of starvation, extreme overcrowding and denial of medical assistance”.
The report, Stars on Their Shoulders. Blood on Their Hands: War Crimes Committed by the Nigerian Military, also alleges that more than 1,200 people have been extrajudicially executed by soldiers or allied vigilante groups since February 2012. It claims the worst case took place on 14 March 2014 when the military killed more than 640 detainees who had fled Giwa barracks after Boko Haram attacked.
Many of these killings appear to be reprisals following attacks. A senior military official told Amnesty that soldiers “go to the nearest place and kill all the youths … people killed may be innocent and not armed”.
The report alleges that military forces arbitrarily arrested at least 20,000 people, mostly young men and boys, some just nine years old. It says detainees are held incommunicado in extremely overcrowded, unventilated cells without sanitary facilities and with little food or water.
Amnesty claims that a high-ranking military officer gave it a list of 683 detainees who died in custody between October 2012 and February 2013. The organisation also obtained evidence that in 2013, more than 4,700 bodies were brought to a mortuary from a detention facility in Giwa barracks.
A former detainee who spent four months in detention described how, on arrival, the soldiers said: “Welcome to your die house. Welcome to your place of death.” Only 11 of 122 men he was arrested with survived, he said.
Amnesty researchers also witnessed emaciated corpses in mortuaries, and one former Giwa detainee told the organisation that around 300 people in his cell died after being denied water for two days: “Sometimes we drank people’s urine, but even the urine you at times could not get.”
The conditions for prisoners in Giwa barracks and detention centres in Damaturu were allegedly so overcrowded that hundreds of detainees were packed into small cells where they had to take turns sleeping or even sitting on the floor. “Hundreds have been killed in detention either [by soldiers] shooting them or by suffocation,” a military officer told Amnesty, describing the situation in Sector Alpha detention centre, known as “Guantanamo”. Amnesty claims that on a single day, 47 detainees died there as a result of suffocation.
To combat the spread of disease and stifle the stench, cells were regularly fumigated with chemicals. Fumigation may have led to the deaths of many detainees in their poorly ventilated cells. One military official based at Giwa barracks told Amnesty: “Many Boko Haram suspects died as a result of fumigation. They fumigated with the chemicals you use for killing mosquitoes. It is something very powerful. It is very dangerous.”
Former detainees and senior military sources described how detainees were regularly tortured to death, hung on poles over fires, tossed into deep pits or interrogated using electric batons.
Boko Haram has been fighting to impose sharia law across Nigeria’s north for the last six years, massacring civilians and kidnapping thousands of women and children, most notoriously a group of more than 200 schoolgirls in Chibok. But Amnesty alleges that the military’s response has resulted in further atrocities against civilians.
The international criminal court (ICC) in the Hague has previously said there was insufficient evidence tying Nigeria’s military to systematic and orchestrated atrocities targeting civilians. But the report says: “Amnesty International believes that the evidence contained in this report and submitted separately to the ICC office of the prosecutor is sufficient to reopen this issue.”
Amnesty also called on Buhari, who was sworn in as president last week, to act against those responsible and end the culture of impunity in the armed forces. Commanders based in the north-east “should be investigated for potential responsibility for war crimes of murder, enforced disappearances and torture”, it said.
It named five officers it believes should be investigated: Major General John A H Ewansiha, Major General Obida T Ethnan, Major General Ahmadu Mohammed, Brigadier General Austin O Edokpayi and Brigadier General Rufus O Bamigboye.
The Nigerian government said it took the allegations seriously but the officers were innocent until proven otherwise. “The government of Nigeria has zero tolerance of the mistreatment of citizens, especially when human rights are involved,” spokesman Mike Omeri said.
“When such allegations are made, the government will not hesitate to investigate. The armed forces are professional in training and conduct. Unless they are investigated we cannot accuse them of this. They are not known to be engaged in this.”
Asked about the alleged abuses at the Giwa barracks, Omeri replied: “Giwa is like any other military barracks. I am not aware of any such things.”
The government of former president Goodluck Jonathan was repeatedly pressured to try all Boko Haram suspects in court. After taking the oath of office, Buhari promised he would review the military’s rules of engagement in a bid to end concerns of rights violations by soldiers.
He also promised to improve “operational and legal mechanisms so that disciplinary steps are taken against proven human right violations by the armed forces”. He vowed that he would tackle “head on” the six-year insurgency and said the military command centre will be relocated from the capital, Abuja, to the north-eastern city of Maiduguri.
On Tuesday Buhari met his security chiefs for the first time and on Wednesday began a visit to neighbouring Niger and Chad, where he is expected to discuss changes to the regional offensive against Boko Haram.
Japheth Omojuwa, a political commentator and blogger, said: “We will see a change in strategy and that is a no-brainer really. The strategy of the immediate past administration – if ever there was a strategy – failed woefully. I see Buhari working with Nigeria’s neighbours Niger, Chad and Cameroon more closely in a less combative or competitive way as it was with Jonathan. That shows already with his first travel outside the country being Niger and Boko Haram clearly the main subject of discussion.”
He added: “He will also enjoy a lot of intelligence support from the United States and technical and moral support from the likes of the United Kingdom and France. I see him fully focused on insecurity while his vice-president, Yemi Osibajo, concentrates on the economy. That would help. The movement of the military’s base from Abuja to Maiduguri shows pro-activeness, his willingness to take the war to the terrorists.”
Antony Goldman, a west Africa risk analyst at London-based PM Consulting, said: “There have been significant gains over the last four months but there remains a lot of structural work to be done to create a fully professional military. There are some long-term issues that, even with the will, are not going to be fixed with the change of leadership, but the change might be part of that process.”
Source: Theguardian.com
By: David Smith
