Rights panel submits report, calls for compensation

A special panel set up by the Nigerian government to investigate three decades of human rights abuses on Tuesday submitted its report, recommending compensation for victims of the worst abuses. The eight-volume report of the Human Rights Violations Investigation Commission (HRVIC) submitted to President Olusegun Obasanjo by its chairman, Justice Chukwudifu Oputa, covers abuses from Nigeria's first military coup in January 1966 to the end of army rule in May 1999. Oputa said his commission received evidence from over 2,000 witnesses and obtained 1,750 exhibits on human rights abuses during its one year of public hearings. Many individuals and groups, he noted, were denied their rights simply for seeking such rights and expressing their beliefs, particularly by the military rulers. "Compensation for such abuses would serve as a soothing balm for the achievement of genuine reconciliation and healing of past wounds," he said. Pointing out that compensation did not necessarily have to be monetary, Oputa said it would "be a form of compensation if, for instance, government rewarded a community that suffered neglect in the past with a development project". Obasanjo, who set up the HRVIC as one of his first acts following his election that ended military in 1999, promised to implement the recommendations. "We will, with maximum dispatch and all seriousness, look clinically into your report," he said. Modelled after South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, Obasanjo stressed that the work of the HRVIC would provide the foundation his government needed to redress the wrongs of the past and reconcile Nigerians with each other. "We need to be remorseful and sorry for our past misdeeds and as a people resolve never to allow it happen again," he said.