04:16 pm
Guinea: Murder, Rape, and Chinese Investment
Unless you follow international news closely, you may have missed the tragic recent events in Guinea. From a September 29 NYT report:
Streets were deserted and shops were shut tight Tuesday in Conakry, Guinea, a day after government troops went on a brutal rampage at an opposition rally, shooting, stabbing, raping and assaulting dozens of men and women in a packed stadium.
Hospitals in the city were full of the wounded from what opponents of the military government here termed a massacre, and human rights groups continued to revise upward the number of dead, saying Tuesday that about 157 people are known to have been killed. Over a thousand victims had suffered gunshot wounds or other injuries, the groups said.
[A] precise death toll was impossible to ascertain because the army had removed bodies from the stadium where as many as 50,000 had gathered to protest the ruling military junta. . . .Witnesses said women were raped in public by the soldiers and sexually assaulted with their guns; the military fired repeated volleys on unarmed civilians at point-blank range, human rights officials said.
The most brutal soldiers were identified as belonging to the elite, red-beret-wearing presidential guard.
Capt. Moussa Dadis Camara, who took power in a coup d’etat last December after the death of Guinea’s previous dictator, has vehemently denied any responsibility for his soldiers’ brutality.
The government reported 56 dead, saying many persons had been trampled, while human rights advocates have documented at least 150 murders and at least 1,000 injured, substantiated by photographs of countless dead bodies that had been shot. Many of these photos were provided to various news organizations, including the New York Times.
Numerous reports have emerged describing brutal rapes of women and children, including a cellphone photo, also provided to the New York Times that shows soldiers surrounding a woman on the ground. Other media reports from the IRIN Africa news service on the “Aftermath of Rape” in Guinea elaborates in explicit terms:
At an 8 October gathering of Guinean women beaten or raped during the recent military attack on demonstrators, all wept as one young woman presented torn clothes soldiers had ripped off of her.
“We all collapsed in tears. It is unspeakably painful what happened here in Guinea,” Aïssata Daffe of the Union des Forces Républicaines political party.
The gathering was part of an ongoing effort by local NGOs and civil society organizations to collect information about the sexual violence during the 28 September military crackdown in order to appeal for assistance and justice. NGOs are still trying to determine how many women and girls were raped. For now 33 cases have been documented, according to local and international aid agencies.
In response, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement to reporters in Washington, D.C. saying the “events [in Guinea] cannot be allowed to continue” and that “It was criminality of the greatest degree, and those who committed such acts should not be given any reason to expect that they will escape justice.” Clinton quickly dispatched Deputy Assistant Secretary of State William Fitzgerald, who met Camara yesterday and “us[ed] strong language” in a tense discussion that reportedly lasted for more than two hours.
Fitzgerald urged Camara not to run for re-election (Camara’s decision to run after promising not to is what prompted the peaceful opposition demonstration) and told the President that the events of Sept. 28th were directly tied to him. Later this month, Patricia N. Moller, currently U.S. Ambassador to Burundi, should arrive in Conakry to serve as the new U.S. Ambassador. We can only hope that she is able to maintain pressure on Camara.
Most Western diplomats have concluded the violence has undercut any shed of credbility that Camara had once possessed, and do not forsee him continuing as head of the National Council for Democracy and Development (CNDD), the 32 senior and middle ranking military officers (and a few civilians) behind last December’s coup.
Bernard Kouchner, the Foreign Minister of France, announced the suspension of military aid to Guinea, declaring that France could no longer work with Camara and urging intervention by the international community. France is supporting the initiative by the Commission of the African Union to send President Blaise Compaoré of Burkina Faso as mediator to address the Guinea crisis, and has encouraged the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the African Union, and the UN Commission on Human Rights to set up an international commission of inquiry.
Yesterday in Abuja, Nigeria, ECOWAS issued a Final Communique on the Guinea situation, stipulating that Guinea take a number of specific actions, including a pledge by Samara and other members of the junta that they would not stand for elections. The communique itself is written in quite blunt and uncharacteristically direct language, according to a retired State Department official who has worked extensively in West Africa. The official said that the quantity of strong documentary evidence of the violence was a significant contributing factor to the language — such as saying that “raped men, be treated and released from the hospital” — which is quite unusual and speaks to the chaos and anarchy that must have occurred on the ground.
Amid the disintegration of Guinea society, the junta announced a $7 billion infrastructure mining and oil deal with China. Guinea has the largest bauxite deposits in the world and is one of the poorest nations in Africa where people live on less than $1 per day.
Stay classy, Hu Jintao.
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