Guinea mayhem was ‘crime against humanity’ by its military rulers, UN report asserts
Killings of government opponents by troops in Guinea in September amounted to “crimes against humanity” and the west African country’s military rulers should be held responsible, a UN inquiry panel said Monday.
The commission said it was able to confirm the identities of 156 people killed or missing during the assault by forces loyal to military junta leader, Captain Moussa Dadis Camara, in an opposition protest that had gathered in a stadium in the capital Conakry on September 28.
It added that at least 109 women were subjected to “rapes and other sexual violence, including sexual mutilations and sexual slavery” during the mayhem, which sparked worldwide international condemnation.
Women and girls were carried away to barracks and officers’ homes to serve as sex slaves for several days. Others were raped at the scene with batons and knives, then some had rifles forced up their vaginas and fired, according to the report.
“It is reasonable to conclude that the crimes perpetrated on September 28 and the following days can be described as “crimes against humanity,” said the inquiry panel, established by UN chief Ban Ki-moon in late October.
Its 60-page report said there was reasonable ground to presume that Camara, his aide de camp Aboubacar Sidiki Diakite and major Moussa Tieggboro Camara, the minister in charge of special services and the fight against drug trafficking, should be personally held to account before international justice.
The commission, which interviewed 700 witnesses, said the number of “victims is probably higher” as the ruling junta in the former French colony in west Africa moved to destroy evidence of the crimes committed in the Conakry stadium.
These included removal of bodies, burial in mass graves, denial of medical care to the victims and military takeover of hospitals and morgues.
The report recommended that the UN Security Council take account of the situation in Guinea and that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees set up an office there, at least for next year.
It also enjoins the Guinean government “to provide families of victims with all relevant information on the case of the missing, to ask the International Criminal Court to investigate presumed crimes against humanity, to provide adequate compensation to the victims and to impose targeted sanctions against the main perpetrators of these violations.”
In Paris, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said he endorsed the conclusions in the UN report.
“The episode in the stadium concerns both Guineans and the entire world, because it was a crime against humanity,” he told reporters in Paris.
“I think that it needs a specific inquiry by the International Criminal Court… Will that be enough, legally speaking? I don’t know,” he said.
Camara himself was shot and wounded by Diakite on December 3, after elements of the junta fell out with each other over who should take the blame for the September bloodshed.
He is currently in Morocco receiving treatment for his wounds, while his attacker remains on the run in Guinea.
There are fears a civil war may erupt if he returns, but the regime has warned it would resist any attempt to deploy international peacekeepers.
The United States, along with international and African regional groupings, has been urging Guinea’s ruling junta to step down and make way for a transitional body.
Camara took power in Guinea last December in a military coup carried out in the wake of president Lansana Conte’s death.
In response to rumors that Camara had discreetly returned to Conakry, the permanent secretary of the junta, Colonel Moussa Keita, told AFP in Dakar by telephone: “He’s not yet back, he’s still in Rabat, he’s resting a bit.”
Keita said Camara’s health had “greatly improved” and that “he could be back in a little while.”
Camara has made no statement or public appearance since he was shot. /ref:AFP/Dec22, 2009
