RIGHTS-SIERRA LEONE: Report Details Horrific Abuses

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Jun 27 1999 (IPS) - While the world continues to focus its attention on human rights abuses in Kosovo, a report by a major US human rights group gives details of the horrific violations that took place thousands of miles to the south – in Sierra Leone.

The Human Rights Watch (HRW) report, ‘Getting Away with Murder Mutilation, and Rape,’ provides chilling testimony by victims and eyewitnesses of last January’s rebel offensive in Sierra Leone’s capital city, Freetown.

Thousands of residents were killed or mutilated before West African peacekeeping forces pushed the rebels out of the city.

“The battle for Freetown and the ensuing three week rebel occupation of the capital was characterized by the systematic and widespread perpetration of all classes of atrocities against the civilian population,” according to the 57-page report by the New York-based rights group.

They “marked the most intensive and concentrated period of human rights violation in Sierra Leone’s eight-year civil war,” the report said.

Based on interviews carried out by HRW staff in April, May, and June, the report was released as negotiations in Lome, Togo, on a peace deal between the government of President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah and the rebel Revolution United Front (RUF) intensified this week with the arrival of diplomats from South Africa, Britain, and the United States.

Togolese Foreign Minister Joseph Koffigoh was acting as mediator in trying to reach agreement on how many ministries RUF will hold in a future coalition government and on the future role of the Nigerian-led West African peace-keeping force (ECOMOG), whic h took back Freetown in fierce fighting six months ago.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson, was also due in Freetown for her first visit to Sierra Leone Thursday to help bolster the peace process, which began with a cease-fire accord May 19, and promote human rights in the war-torn West African country.

In a letter sent to Robinson last week, HRW appealed to her to push for a settlement that safeguards the principle that gross abusers of human rights should not be treated with impunity.

HRW conceded that the country’s weak judicial system and police force were incapable of assuring that all human rights violators in Sierra Leone would be brought to justice.

The letter said “it is necessary for the future peace of the country that those who have committed the worst atrocities, especially those in command positions, are not rewarded with general amnesties and uncritical inclusion in government structures that are supposed to re-establish respect for human rights and the rule of law.”

In the same letter, the group also called for the international community to give far greater attention and support to Sierra Leone than it has in the past, particularly in light of the priority it gave to Kosovo.

“The level of international response to human rights abuses in Kosovo stands in stark contrast to the way in which the appalling atrocities committed in Sierra Leone have largely been ignored,” HRW told Robinson.

‘Your visit to Sierra Leone offers an opportunity for the international community outside Africa to show that the human rights of all human beings are equally valuable.”

A country of almost five million people, Sierra Leone has been engulfed in civil war for most of the last nine years. Estimates of the number of dead vary widely – from about 15,000 to 50,000, the estimated cited by HRW.

In addition, about half of the country’s population has been displaced, with hundreds of thousands forced to flee to Guinea and other neighbouring countries.

The war, which was confined mainly to the countryside until this year, has been marked by extraordinary brutality, particularly since Feb, 1998, when the military junta later with the RUF gave up power to Kabbah.

The combined RUF-junta forces killed thousands of civilians – men, women and children – last year, and thousands more were abducted or mutilated – mostly by the amputation of limbs in what appeared to be a deliberate campaign of mayhem and terror.

Those same tactics were employed last January when the RUF launched its offensive in Freetown. By the end of January, both government and independent sources estimated that several thousands of civilians had been killed by rebel forces.

“The rebels dragged entire family units out of their homes and murdered them, hacked off the hands of children and adults, burned people alive in their houses, and rounded up hundreds of young women, took them to urban rebel bases, and sexually abused them,” according to the report.

Several hundred people – mostly men, but also women and children were victims of amputation, it said.

These operations appeared to be well organised and even premeditated, according to the report which documents evidence that some RUF units specialised in particular forms of atrocities, such as mutilation.

As ECOMOG forces counterattacked, and the RUF retreated through the capital, the rebels often set fire to whole neighbourhoods, leaving entire city blocks in ashes, forcing more than 50,000 people from their homes, and forcibly abducting thousands of c hildren and young women, according to the report.

In some cases, RUF used civilians as “shields” against ECOMOG, rousting them from their homes and forcing them to crowd into positions between the two armed forces.

“This is a war in which civilians are the targets,” said Peter Takirambudde, the director of HRW’s Africa division. “The crimes against humanity described in this report are unspeakably brutal, and the world must not simply avert its attention from the crisis.”

While RUF was responsible for the vast majority of atrocities and other abuses, ECOMOG and local police and civil defence forces also committed serious abuses – mostly summary executions of suspected RUF prisoners, according to the report.