|
|
|
In-Depth:
Justice for a Lawless World? Rights and reconciliation in a new era of international law
|
 Download this in-depth report
Part I 6.36 MB
Part II 2.40 MB
- Professor Noam Chomsky
- ICC Chief Prosecutor Moreno Ocampo
- Samantha Power, Professor of Practice in Human Rights Policy
- Juan Mendez ,President of the International Center for Transitional Justice
- Justice Geoffrey Robertson Q.C.
- Dr Fanie du Toit, Programme Director for Educating for Reconciliation at the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation in South Africa
- Abdullah An-Na`im, Ph.D, Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA
- Augustin Nkusi, the Director of the Legal Support Unit, National Service of Gacaca Jurisdictions, Rwanda
- Benjamin Gumpert, counsel representing Justin Mugenzi, who is currently on trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
- Hanny Megally, Director, Middle East and North Africa Program, International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
- Paul van Zyl, Country Programme Director at the International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ)
- Johnston Busingye, Secretary General of the Ministry of Justice in Rwanda
- Dennis McNamara (Special Adviser on Internal Displacement to the UN’s Emergency Relief Co-ordinator and Director of the OCHA Inter-agency Internal Displacement Division) on the rule of law
IRIN welcomes feedback. Send your messages to feedback. |
|
AFRICA: Victims’ Voices
|
| Transitional justice is a broader form of justice than that provided by courts. One of the key areas is the ‘truth commissions’ which allow people who have suffered injustice the chance to tell their story. The focus is on the victims and giving them a voice.Below are the testimonies of some victims from around the world, telling their story of what happened to them. | | SIERRA LEONE | Fatmata, 11, who lives in a camp for internally displaced people near Port Loko, was one of three children abducted on while out in search of food and wood. Both she and her 12-year-old friend Kadi were raped by the ‘rebels'. She described her abduction which lasted for nearly three weeks:
We went to find wood and potato leaves in a village called Mathiaka […] one of the men grabbed me, I got away but then more of them came and surrounded us. They beat me, hit me hard on the back of the neck with a gun and then later gave me a bushel of rice to carry to their camp in Rofurawa. The one who caught made me pound rice and wash his clothes and he was the one who had sex with me. I begged him to let me go to my people but he said, "I'm going to have sex with you until they disarm us." I wanted so much to escape but I didn't know the bush around that place and he kept saying he'd kill me if I ever tried to get away. Some days I complained to his wife. She was so nice […] she sympathised and said she too had been abducted. I was with them for 20 days. I was bleeding so much and still feel so weak. I'm only 11 years old […] I haven't even seen my period yet.
Haja, 17, was one of 10 young women taken off a bus after being ambushed near Rogberi by rebel soldiers on 17 January. She described how all 10 were abducted and later raped:
I was on my way up-country to attend my father's funeral when at around l0:30 a.m. a group of about 40 rebels with RPG's [rocket-propelled grenades], guns and machetes stopped us and forced the driver to go off the road until we reached an abandoned village. He ordered us to come down and walk single file inside a house. We were so frightened and some were crying, so he said, "Why are you crying? Are you bereaved? Because now we're going to cut your throats so you'll really have something to cry over." The rebels searched us and separated all the young girls from the rest of the group. Then they walked the 10 of us to another abandoned village where they made us sit, and started calling us into a house one by one. The first one was a girl named Isatu. We saw five of them go in and heard her crying. I was the third to be called. They told me to lie down on a dirty brown cloth. I said I don't know man business. I started bleeding after the first one and screamed that I was going to die. I pleaded with them but they told me to shut up and that they'd do what ever they wanted with me. Four of them used me that day. I just prayed, "Father save me from these people and return me safely to my home."
Abu, an elder from the village Lalbanka, was one of seven people abducted by the rebels on 14 February and forced to carry zinc roofing panels stripped from abandoned villages. An elderly woman, also abducted from his village, was severely beaten and later shot because she was unable to carry the load. Abu described what happened:
At 3:00 p.m. I'd gone into the field to use the toilet and on my way back they surrounded me. They led me at gunpoint and I saw that six more people from the nearby villages of Lalsoso and Yingesa had also been caught. First they forced us to take zinc panels off the houses and then they gave us bundles of 20 to carry. My neighbor, Hawa, tried walking with that big bundle but she couldn't and dropped it along the way. Then they took away some of the load and told her to walk but some time later she just collapsed from exhaustion. Two of them started beating her with sticks. They made us stand around and watch. They ordered her to dance and to kiss them. She tried but blood was streaming out of her head. I am a village elder and she came over and grabbed onto my pants and said "They're killing me. Help me." I said she was my daughter-in-law and begged them to stop but they said they would kill me too. We left her there - unconscious and bleeding - with one rebel. Later that night that rebel, who called himself "Junior”, boasted that he had killed her and told us that that is what happens to the ones who don't work. She was the mother of six and grandma of seven. I still had her blood from where she held onto my pants.
Human Rights Watch | | | EL SALVADOR | Carlos Antonio Gomez Montano was a paratrooper stationed at Ilopango Air Force Base. He claimed to have seen eight Green Beret advisers watching two "torture classes" during which a 17-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl were tortured. Montano claimed that his unit and the Green Berets were joined by Salvadoran Air Force Commander Rafael Bustillo and other Salvadoran officers during these two sessions in January 1981. A Salvadoran officer told the assembled soldiers, "[watching] will make you feel more like a man.''
Another Salvadoran soldier, Ricardo Castro, is the first officer to come forward with information about death squad activity. Castro recalled a class where Salvadoran soldiers asked the adviser about an impasse in their torture sessions:
He was obviously against torture a lot of the time. He favoured selective torture […] When they learned something in class, they might go back to their fort that night and practice […] I remember very distinctly some students talking about the fact that people were conking out on them [...] as they were administering electric shock. 'We keep giving him the electric shock, and he just doesn't respond. What can we do?' […] The American gave a broad smile and said, “You've got to surprise him. We know this from experience. Give him a jolt. Do something that will just completely amaze him, and that should bring him out of it”.'
Death Squads in El Salvador : a pattern of US Complicity, David Kirsch
Covert Action Quarterly, Summer 1990 | | | BOSNIA | Instead of a blindfold, the Serb soldiers bound Enisa's eyes with their socks. The stench made her throw up, so they hit her until she learned that 'Serb socks don't smell'. Seven 'heroes of the nation' raped her and beat her for days. At first she resisted, but eventually they knocked out her teeth with a rifle-butt breaking her jaw. When she lost consciousness they would 'give her a bath', i.e. douse her in cold water. Terrified that she would be driven mad, she suddenly liked the idea and saw madness as a way out. She began singing Serb songs louder and louder, then dancing with the chetnik who had presumably butchered her husband. The soldiers were dumbfounded. They threatened her, held a knife to her throat, but she only sang louder. Believing she had gone off her head entirely, the soldiers paid less attention to her and she managed to escape, by hiding in a potato sack. When the journalist Seada Vranic spoke with Enisa a few months later, in July 1992, she saw before her a hunched, grey-haired old woman with a contorted face. That was just one month before Enisa's twenty-eighth birthday.
Seada Vranic, Breaking the Wall of Silence | | | EAST TIMOR | My family was fearful that there would be a lot of violence when the result of the ballot was announced. I was sent off to the Cannossian Sisters' residence early in the morning, at about 6 a.m.. From the beginning the militias were out and making their presence felt around the Cannossian residence. They were shooting into the air to scare the youths out of the residence. TNI (Indonesian National Army) and Brimob (mobile police brigade) were there as well and they were shooting into the air, too. They were shooting from the morning to the night.
A militia member finally broke into the residence on 7 September 1999. The Sister went out and saw that the militia member was right at the door and she tried to negotiate with him. He told everyone that we had to go to the police compound or else we would die. We did not want to go there. We were afraid we would be killed.
The police who were there with guns appeared to be supporting the militias. We were told that from the police compound we would be taken to Atambua and Kupang [in West Timor ]. The Sister refused to agree to us going to the police compound. After some negotiations, she announced that we were going to the UNAMET compound instead.Then we walked to the UNAMET compound on foot. We had to leave everything behind. We were not attacked along the way. We were silent, scared and kept our heads down. We went to the school compound which is next door and connected to the UNAMET compound by a small doorway.
On the afternoon of 10 September 1999, the militias attacked the school compound. I saw them coming in on two motorcycles, with three people on each one. When they first arrived there seemed to be a mock struggle with the army. Then they yelled 'Attack, Attack!' The TNI soldiers outside did nothing. They looked the other way. The people on the front of each of the two motorcycles were TNI uniformed soldiers. On the back each had two Aitarak members wearing the Aitarak militia black T-shirts. They came in with swords which they were swinging at people, but they did not hit anyone.
The people inside the compound were panicking and some were so scared that they jumped over the fence which had barbed wire on top. Some parents were so terrified for the safety of their children that they just hurled their babies and young children over the fence. Many of them were cut on the wire or hurt when they fell on the other side. I could see that the army was playing a very direct role in this attack. They were shooting in the air trying to frighten and panic the people and looting all our possessions.
"Rafael" (not his real name) is an 18-year-old student who was attending high school in Dili before the independence ballot. During the period leading up to the ballot, Rafael witnessed a Brimob police officer assault a journalist - whom he describes as "Chinese or Japanese" - who had been filming another Brimob police officer allegedly killing a pro-independence youth. "Suddenly [the] Brimob policeman grabbed the journalist from behind, put one hand over his mouth, threw him in the ditch on the side of the road and jumped up and down on his back."
On the night of the 3 September 1999 Rafael and his family heard that the result of the ballot would be announced the next day. Nervous of what might happen, his parents, brothers and sisters went to the UNAMET compound, but since "it was already dark and I did not have time" Rafael went instead to a Church, where a number of other refugees had also gathered. Early the next day Rafael and about 15 young men climbed a nearby hill, where they had a good view of the church and the school and seminary next door:
The Aitarak militias, the army - although dressed in Aitarak uniform, I recognised some of them as BTT [Territorial Battalion] soldiers from my area - and Brimob police in uniform arrived at the church with two big army trucks. They tried to get the refugees out of the church, but the refugees refused. Then they threw a grenade into the Portuguese headquarters [of the election observers' delegation] which was further along, to frighten them […] I saw that the Brimob police and Aitarak militia had guns and were poking the refugees with them to force them onto the truck. People were screaming and were very upset.
They filled up the two trucks with people and took them in the direction of Comoro. The same thing happened at the seminary and school. Two trucks came. The Brimob and Aitarak and BTT pretending to be Aitarak, attacked the compound, forced people out at gunpoint and then loaded them into trucks. The priests, seminarians and the choirboys were all treated the same way. Those who refused to move were kicked and beaten.
At this point, Rafael and his group came under fire: "Two bullets hit the earth very close, just in front of where I was lying. The bullets came from the direction of the Portuguese compound." The youths fled, pursued for a short while by "about 15 soldiers", according to Rafael. Eluding them, Rafael continued on his way.
One day while he was in the Dili area (Rafael cannot remember the exact date), hiding among some coffee trees with a group of refugees, Rafael says he witnessed the killing of a woman by Indonesian soldiers. He saw two cars arriving filled with what he believes were Kopassus (Special Forces Command) troops. "There must have been others as well because I looked out from the coffee trees and I could see many red berets," he says:
The moment they saw the Kopassus the refugees panicked and started running. The Kopassus troops ran into the trees, fanned out and then started shooting at us. I was running away when I saw an older woman hit by a bullet in her head. She was standing next to her husband who cannot walk and was in a wheel chair. She was looking after him as she always did. When the bullet hit her she fell and her head fell directly into her husband's lap. It was very sad and he was so shocked. She died instantly. She was the mother of five. She was known as Lita and her husband was known as Tilo. They originally lived in Bemori but had fled to Dare when the situation became too bad. There was another elderly lady who was so shocked by the shooting that she fell onto a rock and suffered a head wound. I do not know if any others were injured.
After the shooting incident, Rafael sought refuge in the UNAMET compound in Dili, crawling in through a hole in the wire of the UNAMET fence. There he was reunited with his family. They spent a further three days inside the compound before being evacuated to Australia . His memory of the trip to the airport was of "sitting in an army truck with TNI [Indonesian National Army] soldiers all around us. There was a little boy crying and crying”.
Of his future plans, he commented:
I arrived in Australia on Wednesday 15 September 1999. In the future I want to continue my studies. I do not care where, but I want to study. If given a free choice, I would probably want to study in Australia - because many of the schools and the university in Dili have been destroyed - but then I would like to return to East Timor and live in freedom. I am not sure if there is any hope for the future, but I feel that if I could study, I might begin to feel that the future exists.
Amnesty International | | | NEPAL | I was sleeping when six or seven soldiers came into our flat early one morning. My brother-in-law was nearly shot when he asked why they were arresting me. As soon as I was dragged inside a van, they tied my hands and blindfolded me. They pushed me down onto the floor of the vehicle. Then, one of the soldiers started hitting my stomach and pounding my head. Another grabbed my testicles so hard that I still feel the pain. They kept on battering for another 30 minutes – after that I could not scream anymore, I fainted.
At the barracks, they put a clip on my ear and began administering electric shocks while shouting that I was a Maoist worker. I fainted again. When I woke up, they started caning me with bamboo sticks and forced water into my mouth and nose. They made me lie flat on the floor and they took turns to step over my stomach and punched my mouth so many times that I vomited blood many times.
They tortured me for four hours until the evening. They offered biscuits but I could not eat as my mouth had swollen due to the beatings and electric shock. The next morning, around six, security personnel came and started kicking me while I was asleep. They told me that they would not torture me if I confessed that I was a Maoist.
The pain was so unbearable that I pleaded with them to just shoot me dead. After a few days the interrogators returned, said that they had made a mistake and that I was an innocent civilian. They said I would be released, but threatened to arrest and torture me again if I reported the incident to anyone. | | | CHILE | Viviana Uribe, a 48-year-old human rights activist with a warm smile and confident air, dug through her pocketbook for some pills as she prepared to leave her Santiago apartment to do some errands the other day: I feel a lot better, I really do," she said in a strong, steady voice. "I still get my headaches, but maybe they are a little better. Ever since I heard Pinochet would be judged for his crimes, it has been a tremendous relief for me." Given the horrendous torture she experienced - Ms Uribe said that she was raped four times and that among other things, electric cables had repeatedly been clamped to her eyelids, lips, tongue and around her head for bolts of shock during interrogation sessions - she appears to be the picture of a well-adjusted woman.
Clifford Krauss Antiago, New York Times | |
[ENDS]
|
|
|
|
|