President dismisses rights report

Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo on Tuesday dismissed a report by Human Rights Watch on extrajudicial killings by the Nigerian military in 2001, news agencies reported. "I have dismissed the report with the contempt it deserves because it failed to condemn the killing of soldiers who were sent to separate the feuding Jukuns and Tivs," Obasanjo was quoted by PANA as saying at a news conference in the Senegalese capital, Dakar.

"Is it only when soldiers kill civilians that you talk about human rights. Were the 19 soldiers beheaded not human beings?" Obasanjo was quoted as saying. PANA added that he explained that the military operation became necessary after the authorities concerned failed to produce the soldiers' killers.

On 10 October 2001, armed men ambushed and captured 19 soldiers whom the federal government had deployed to end violence in the central Nigeria between members of the Tiv and Jukun ethnic groups. A few days later, their mutilated bodies were found in a primary school in a Tiv stronghold.

Human Rights Watch reported that between 22 and 24 October 2001, several hundred soldiers killed over 200 unarmed civilians and destroyed property in more than seven towns and villages in reprisal for the death of the soldiers. Those who died at the hands of the military were victims of collective punishment, targeted simply because they belonged to the same ethnic group, Human Rights Watch said in its report, issued this month. It described the killings as extrajudicial.