RIGHTS: 1999 Another Grim Year of Abuses, Says Amnesty

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jun 14 2000 (IPS) - Last year saw little improvement in global human-rights conditions, as imprisonment, torture, and political killings continued to be used by many governments to silence opposition and maintain their hold on power, according to the annual report by Amnesty International released here Wednesday.

“For the majority of the world’s population 1999 brought repression, poverty or war,” according to the report, which catalogues human-rights developments in 147 countries around the world.

While the international community responded with determination to serious human-rights crises in Kosovo and East Timor, “massive suffering in other countries went virtually unnoticed,” the report found.

Little attention was paid, for example, to “the most serious and wide-ranging crackdown on peaceful dissent for a decade in China,” according to the report, which cited the repression of religious groups and “intense repression” in the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang.

And while the western press focused on the intensive Russian bombing campaign of Chechnya, it ignored the “systematic harassment and intimidation of Chechens in Moscow” and elsewhere.

Yet the news for the year was not all bad. The decision by the British courts that former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet could face prosecution for crimes against humanity committed during his rule created a “very important precedent for the future of human rights.” And other steps by many governments to end impunity and torture offered glimmers of hope.

Still, many parts of the world continued to suffer grave abuses, with torture and ill-treatment of prisoners and detainees reported in 132 of the 147 countries covered by the report.

In Africa, ravaged by civil and interstate conflicts from Sierra Leone in the west to Angola in the south and the Horn in the east, the situation was particularly grim, according to the 294-page report.

Summary killings were carried out in 17 countries of the region – almost half of the 38 countries where extra-judicial killings were confirmed during 1999. Rebel groups in 18 African countries were found responsible for serious abuses, including deliberate and arbitrary killings of civilians, torture, and hostage-taking.

“Armed conflict, mass displacement of people, torture, ill- treatment and endemic impunity continued to be rife in the African region,” according to the report, which said abuses against civilians by rebel forces in Sierra Leone “have been among the worst known.” They included killings, cutting off of limbs, most frequently hands and arms, rape and other forms of sexual abuse and abductions.

Thousands of unarmed civilians, including women and children, were killed in Burundi, Congo, Angola, Sudan, and the Democratic Republic of Congo by both government forces and rebel groups, the report noted.

Armed and inter-ethnic conflict also claimed the lives of thousands of civilians in the Asia-Pacific region and facilitated other human rights abuses, including torture, disappearances and arbitrary detentions.

After the inhabitants of East Timor voted overwhelmingly for independence, hundreds of people were killed and tens of thousands more forced to flee violent attacks orchestrated by the Indonesian army. Hundreds more have since been killed in Indonesia in the context of counter-insurgency operations, communal violence, and political protest.

Elsewhere in the region, violent ethnic conflict in the Solomon Islands left hundreds dead or injured and thousands displaced. Armed conflict in India also resulted in hundreds killed in the north-eastern states and Jammu and Kashmir.

Taleban forces in Afghanistan burned homes, destroyed orchards, wheat fields and irrigation systems in their drive to defeat Tajik opponents in the northern part of the country, while in Burma, the military pressed counter-insurgency campaigns against ethnic minorities that included the practices of forced labour and relocation, the report said.

In the Americas, violent armed conflict continued in Colombia, where human rights abuses by the armed forces, army-backed paramilitaries, and guerrilla groups actually escalated in 1999.

Despite the ongoing efforts to bring Pinochet to justice, according to the report, impunity remained “rampant” in most of the region, including Colombia.

Police harassment and brutality – especially against members of the most vulnerable sectors of society such as indigenous people, street children, and migrant workers, also remained a major problem throughout the Americas, including the United States, where many unarmed suspects shot by police were members of ethnic minority groups.”

Torture of prisoners was also widespread with reports registered in Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, and Peru. Several governments, notably Peru, also took steps to reduce the jurisdiction of regional human-rights mechanisms.

In the Middle East and North Africa, widespread and serious abuses continued to be reported throughout 1999. Torture and cruel treatment continued in Saudi Arabia where Amnesty recorded 103 executions for the year. In Israel, most members of the security forces continued to enjoy impunity for abuses.

In Iraq, hundreds of people, including possible prisoners of conscience were executed during the year. While the number of killings fell sharply from previous years in Algeria, the authorities failed to take concrete measures to clear up past cases of disappearances.

While NATO’s campaign in Kosovo and the Russian bombing of Chechnya dominated the human-rights news from Europe, less reported were the rise in the number of reports of torture in Turkey, the persecution of the Roma throughout much of Eastern Europe, and a worsening of repression in former Soviet states in the Caucasus and Central Asia.

On the more positive side, the situation in Nigeria continued to improve in 1999 as political prisoners were released, and a commission of inquiry was established to investigate past abuses.

In Guatemala, the UN-sponsored Commission for Historical Clarification released its report, blaming the armed forces for the vast majority of atrocities committed during the civil war, and the governments of Sri Lanka and Morocco took some steps to address past abuses.

Amnesty also reported progress in its campaign against the death penalty. Bermuda, East Timor, Turkmenistan and Ukraine abolished the death penalty for all crimes and Latvia abolished it for all but exceptional crimes.

Turkmenistan and Lithuania also commuted all their death sentences to life imprisonment, while former Russian President Boris Yeltsin commuted more than 700 death sentences. On the other hand, Trinidad and Tobago resumed a five-year de facto moratorium on executions during 1999.

Almost 2,000 people were executed in 31 countries during the year, the vast majority of them carried out in a tiny handful of nations: China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Congo-Kinshasa, and the United States.